Yesterday, On The Phone With My Hit-And-Run Driver
Yes, it's me again, late December's one-woman anti-crime wave.
Last year at this time, a guy did a hit-and-run on my then almost-brand-new Honda Insight, which was parked in the Whole Foods parking garage on Wilshire and 21st. He didn't just graze my car, either. He hit it at such an angle that his progress into the space next to it was impeded, then he backed up so he could finally pull into the space. Next, he got out of his car, looked at the damage on my car...looked to see if anyone was looking!...and strolled into the store and went shopping!
Very bad idea. Three problems, all of them his:
1. They have video cameras in the garage.
2. He has an easy-to-remember personalized license plate.
3. He hit my car.
Naturally, I tracked him down and had him prosecuted...no thanks to the police (sigh). In Santa Monica, they actually send out a letter to the hit-and-run suspects, saying, "Hey, did you hit somebody's car?" What do they think people are going to say, "Yep, cuff me?" As the SM Police officer on my case said, "He says he didn't do it." Um, yeah. (Details on my detective work will follow after I get to play amateur Clarence Darrow in small claims.)
In brief, it took me considerable time and energy, but not only did he deserve to be prosecuted, I wasn't about to pay a potentially non-refundable $500 deductible on my insurance because some slimebag hit me -- especially since I can't be sure what kind of detective work they do, and I know the kind I do.
Let's just say I know a lot about the guy -- down to which magazines his wife collects (she reportedly has every single copy of a particular magazine), and the names and addresses of his grown children. I've sent a letter to the guy's son, and called the guy myself yesterday -- (one of the suggested) terms of filing in small claims court -- to see if he'd settle. When I told the guy he could either settle or... "I'm going to sue you in small claims court for the time I put in tracking you down"...
He said: We're going to sue you.Me: I didn't do anything wrong.
He: We're gonna sue you for suing. Have your lawyer tell you how that works.
Me: You can't have a lawyer in small claims court...slimeball!
Oh, never mind. See you there!
What's most amazing is, the guy already saw how I doggedly tracked his ass down...all the way to a guilty plea before Judge Kamins in Santa Monica Court out by the airport. Kamins commended me for my detective work, and said the guy wouldn't have been brought to justice but for my efforts. "You should be a detective or a writer" is, I believe, how he put it. Unfortunately, I think he read the statute wrong in not giving me the money for the time I spent doing the police's job for them -- time I would have otherwise spent writing. Hence, my small claims suit.
My determination to file is also colored by the fact that the guy, to this day, shows no remorse for hitting my car and driving off. Amazing. In fact, in court, he scowled at me like I had somehow wronged him. Hey, scumbag...you hit my car!
What's funny is, I hadn't thought about trying to squeeze cash out of the guy until the lawyer the guy's son engaged for him tried to pay me off in exchange for dropping the criminal case against him. No dice, dude. In fact, the main point here, apart from getting my car fixed, was sending a message. In a world where people are increasingly rude and oblivious to anybody but themselves...even if you are unethical, don't be unethical, because you might be unethical...to somebody like ME!
TO BE CONTINUED...
Making Crime Pay!
Woohoo! Got six hundred bucks in the mail today from my car thief ($120-a-month court-ordered restitution he's supposed to pay every month, starting this summer, but hasn't paid for five months). Since he was dumb enought to steal my pink car and drive around Los Angeles in it, it's no wonder he can't spell my name right.
The money was supposed to arrive on Wednesday. Well, he said it would arrive then. When it didn't, I called him and barked at him (in Rottweiler, not Yorkshire Terrier), without so much as a hello: "George, Amy Alkon. WHERE'S MY MONEY!" (For the record, it wasn't a question.) Thiefie claimed to have tracking numbers for the DHL letter, blah blah blah...and would send them to me the next morning "from work." Yeah, right.
Well, he did, and there the package was there when I went to pick up my mail. Finally! He said on the phone that I would have "a surprise package coming." Well, I don't think he's smart enough to successfully blow his nose, so I'm wondering if it might be my dad's typewriter that was in my trunk, along with a brand new Rifat Ozbek jacket I really liked, and $50 worth of party rental tables and chairs -- that turned out to be (and I can't remember the number exactly now) but, well...much more...when the rental tables and chairs turn into purchased tables and chairs...after your car thief makes off with the trunk of your car along with the rest of it.
Beware thieves, hit-and-run drivers, and other dirtbags...It's Accountability Season in Advice Goddess Land!
Next in line? It's...
TO BE CONTINUED!
It Isn't Revenge, It's Accountability
A guy in England wins a court victory against a spammer. Paul Lewis writes in The Guardian:
Nigel Roberts, 37, who runs an internet business in the Channel Islands, wrote a letter of complaint to Media Logistics UK - a company specialising in "electronic direct marketing" - after it sent him an unsolicited email advertising the services of a contract car company."I wrote to the company asking for an apology and claiming damages under regulation 30 of the privacy regulations," Mr Roberts said yesterday. "I also asked under the Data Protection Act for details of the data that the company had obtained and stored about me - and I particularly wanted to know who had supplied them with my email address."
Frustrated by the company's failure to respond with the information and damages he requested, Mr Roberts decided to pursue the matter in a Colchester small claims court under a new anti-spamming law, the Directive on Privacy and Telecommunications, which enables individuals to claim damages against the distributors of unwanted emails. His legal action is thought to be the first of its kind under the directive.
The judge ruled in Mr Roberts' favour yesterday, and he agreed £270 damages and a £30 claim fee in an out-of-court settlement with the marketing company. Although Mr Roberts settled for relatively small amounts, legal experts say much higher sums could be awarded in higher courts.
Let's see more of this. Get a telemarketing phone call or a junk fax? Track the company down and make the thieves pay. And yes, they are thieves -- stealing your time and your toner and using the phone and net connection you pay for to invade your life and sell you shit...and it's about time more people looked at them that way.
I'm waiting for the right fax assault (one where I can track the junk faxer down without too much work), then I'm going to try to press criminal charges against them for theft of my fax toner. If you're a lawyer trolling here, feel free to comment on whether that's actually possible. I just love the idea, though, of showing the scammers that they can't just take people's time and office supplies without paying -- if only in aggravation.
Agnosticism Is For Sissies
I’m not an agnostic. Saying I'm agnostic about the existence of god would be like saying I’m agnostic about the existence of flying carpets on the LA freeways today. Sure, there could be a flying carpet exiting right now at Robertson. But, until I see proof of it — and proof isn’t lots of people believing in it; that’s just peer pressure — I’m going to be, not just atheistic, but a-flyingcarpet-istic as well.
"Psychiatry: Industry Of Death"!
Scientology: Industry Of Money Siphoning! But, there they were, so many of their most famous sheep, flocking around Hollywood's latest museum -- Scientology's "Psychiatry: An Industry Of Death!" -- though not prenatal expert Tom Cruise:
While none of the stars are believed to have a medical degree, the colorful graphics and informative documentaries in the exhibits certainly seemed convincing enough for them to confidently label psychiatry a "fraud" and an "industry of death."Actress Anne Archer delivers the startling news that at least 100,000 electroshocks are administered annually. The CCHR press release further informs that "psychiatrists kill up to 10,000 people" annually with their use of electroshock, which works out to one in ten.
Actor Danny Masterson explains that anyone who disagrees with them on the subject is "completely misinformed."
If your psychiatrist is not otherwise occupied murdering 10 percent of his electroshock patients, you still run the risk of having one of the 10 to 25 percent of psychiatrists that sexually assault their patients (unsubstantiated figures courtesy CCHR).
The American Psychiatric Association was unable to provide a comment for this story.
Yeah, because they're still howling with laughter, even now.
Separation Of Statism And State
If only more people would think instead of simply taking sides. Really interesting piece by Matt Welch in Reason on "why statism may never die in the two oldest democracies":
Like the world's great religions, history's most successful countries—whether led by Bourbon or Bush—create cottage industries of competing explanations that cancel each other out, and mythologies that can't possibly be true. And as long as they continue to prosper, there won't be much structural incentive to fix their obvious flaws.France and the United States, the world's two oldest and longest-bickering democracies, both suffer in their own ways from this curse of success. And until either experiences some kind of catastrophic collapse——a real one, as opposed to the perennial nonfiction predictions—the forces of statism in both countries will maintain the upper hand.
In France, the three most obscene policies from a libertarian point of view are probably the country's poverty-enhancing agricultural subsidies, its ridiculously generous welfare state, and its confiscatory taxation and regulation, all of which contribute to a stifling of domestic entrepreneurship, a multi-decade economic crisis, and a stiff stench of societal malaise.
Yet any argument against these unproductive government intrusions has to overcome three powerful rebuttals: French farming yields the most delicious food and wine on the planet; its health care system (in sharp contrast to the UK's) is a glittering advertisement for socialized medicine; and its public sector is the G8's most productive.
Small wonder that American-style economic neo-liberalism is misportrayed here as "savage capitalism"—compared to the affordable cost and superior quality of health care my wife receives when in France, "savage" is an understatement as a description of her experience with American medicine. Then again, the malaise-inspired dreariness and social immobility that comes as a consequence of the non-productive aspects of L'Etat have plenty to do with why she hasn't lived here for a decade.
The U.S. faces a similar obstacle in the Sisyphean battle against statism. Ninth Circuit Court Judge Alex Kozinski, libertarianism's Great Romanian Hope for the judicial branch, actually signed his name recently to an elaboration of one of the main reasons why limited government as a political project is nearly DOA in America:
While I have a romantic attachment to this vision, I'm far from convinced that it would achieve the goals set for it—that we'd be living in a better world today if only we repudiated the New Deal, or had never adopted it in the first place. Whenever I try to imagine what such a world would look like, I look at the world we do live in and recognize that we don't have it so bad at all. We have the world's strongest economy by far; we are the only superpower, having managed to bury the Evil Empire; and we have more freedom than any other people anytime in history. We must be doing something right.While heartening on one hand, this formulation contains a germ of an idea ominously familiar to those who follow the fates of sporting franchises or the histories of empires: There's a thin, dangerous line between "we must be doing something right" and "we must not be doing anything wrong." Or more relevantly, between that an "we may be doing some things wrong, but that doesn't matter, because we're doing The One Important Thing right enough."
A bunch of live links to books if you go to the original. I'm supposed to be writing, which is different from blogging, in that I don't eat if I don't do it. Okay, okay...there's a wee bit of laziness in there, too!
Time To Choose Between Imaginary Realities!
Limbo, in church terms, is on the way out! So writes Ian Fisher in The New York Times:
This month, 30 top theologians from around the world met at the Vatican to discuss, among other quandaries, the problem of what happens to babies who die without baptism. They do not like the word for it, but what they were really doing, as theological advisers to Pope Benedict XVI, was finally disposing of limbo - a concept that was never official church doctrine but has been an enduring medieval theory of a blissful state among the departed, somehow different from both heaven and hell.Unlike purgatory, a sort of waiting room to heaven for those with some venial faults, the theory of limbo consigned children outside of heaven on account of original sin alone. As a concept, limbo has long been out of favor anyway, as theologically questionable and unnecessarily harsh. It is hard to imagine depriving innocents of heaven. These days it prompts more snickers than anything, as evidenced by the titter of press coverage here along the lines of "Limbo Consigned to Hell."
But it remains an interesting relic, strangely relevant to what the Roman Catholic Church has been and what it wants to be. The theory of limbo bumps up against one of the most contentious issues for the church: abortion. If fetuses are human beings, what happens to their souls if they are aborted? It raises questions of how broadly the church - and its new leader - view the idea of salvation.
And it has some real-life consequences. The church is growing most in poor places like Africa and Asia where infant mortality remains high. While the concerns of the experts reconsidering limbo are more theological, it does not hurt the church's future if an African mother who has lost a baby can receive more hopeful news from her priest in 2005 than, say, an Italian mother did 100 years ago.
"You look at the proper theology, but if there is more consolation, all the better," said the Rev. Luis Ladaria, the Spanish Jesuit who is secretary general of the International Theological Commission, the official body working on limbo. Unlike many issues - the recent emotional debate over homosexuality in the priesthood, for example - limbo seems to garner unanimity that it should exit the church's stage, even if, at the moment, the exact doctrine that will replace it is unclear.
"Limbo has never been a definitive truth of the faith," Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Benedict XVI earlier this year, said in an interview in 1984, during his long term as Pope John Paul II's doctrinal watchdog. "Personally, I would let it drop, since it has always been only a theological hypothesis."
In the words of the inimitable Lena, who sent me this link:
Oxymoron of the Day: "Theological hypothesis"! ! ! ! !
Translation: It doesn't sell!
Writing Versus Sticking Your Name On Somebody Else's Work
Here I am the day after my deadline. (The red hair comes back on Wednesday, and the arm generally grows back by Thursday afternoon.)
Andrew Sullivan, via Julian, has a great point, wondering how many syndicated columnists actually write their own stuff, and how many people actually consider that they might not. I do, for one...personally bleed through the eyeballs every week (ie, write my column). Quite frankly, Albert Einstein could come back to life, knock on my door, and ask me out to dinner on a Monday night and I'd turn him down. (Anybody but Lena or Gregg is unlikely to even motivate me to get up out of my chair and greet them at the gate.)
Sullivan says:
Julian wonders whether non-Beltway insiders understand that most prominent people have ghostwriters penning "their" op-eds, books, etc., and whether there should be more outrage over this quasi-dishonesty. For my part, it's never bothered me that a Times op-ed by, say, a U.S. Senator or the Secretary of Health and Human Services probably wasn't written by the eminence themself - but I was shocked to find myself, during my first year in D.C., being introduced to a guy who ghostwrote for a syndicated columnist. I'm not sure what the difference is, exactly - I suppose there's just something about a regular byline that made me assume, foolishly, that the "author" was writing the thing by himself.This has been a Gregg Easterbrook pet peeve for many years, incidentally - though he tends to focus on praising celebrities and pols who credit their ghostwriters (like John McCain), and pillorying those who don't (like Hillary Clinton, on both It Takes a Village and Living History).
I've heard rumors of two others who have a room full of writers churning out "their" stuff, but without direct knowledge, I won't name names. As for another columnist, whose work now appears to make a bit more sense and be a bit less inane...well, I have my suspicions. Anything to maintain a money-making franchise, I guess!
How Deep Was Your Representative's Hand?
In Tom DeLay's pocket?
Fighting Identity Theft And Cancer
Great story from Dateline (produced by Susan Liebowitz and written by correspondent Josh Mankiewitz), recounted on MSNBC, about Eric Drew, a leukemia patient who pried himself out of his hospital bed, threw on a backpack of cancer drips, and tracked down his identity thief:
It turns out one thing chemo and radiation can’t kill is a Type A personality.
Go to the link -- you'll want to read every word. Very compelling story. It made a difference in my life. Apparently, I'm due to get $600 today from my car thief (part of the restitution he's supposed to be paying me monthly.) Here's his email about it:
Hello Amy, I dont know if you are in town or out of town. I have two money orders ready for you. Each for $300.00 Do you want me to send them to you home address in S.M. or do you want me to send them elsewhere?Please advise. I will send out the next day UPS on Wednesday 12/28/05.
SOrry for the delay.
These $600.00 will put me back on schedule as I said I would. SOrry for the late responce. THings have been pretty bussy around here and some of my finances have been a bit tight.
MOney order # 47261174807 $300.00
MOney order # 47261174796 $300.00
Now, I got the first check for $120 from my car thief in September, after I tracked his ass down on Google and left a message on his cell. (When he wasn't paying, I asked the City Attorney on the case to contact him and tell him to pay, and she said, "Oh, we can't do that." Then I asked her to give me his number. Same response. Ridiculous. So I let my fingers loose on Google, getting him to pay that first $120 after I tracked him down...and getting promises -- unkept, imagine that -- of future checks' arrival.) Well, after I saw this story about Eric Drew, I got mad and got tracking again. I found a posting cached on a Rambler site about a car he was selling, and sent an e-mail to the site owner suggesting that the guy had tried to sell my stolen car (to a classic car lot on Melrose)...perhaps he wasn't the most reliable advertiser?
Perhaps this is just a coincidence, since I have been e-mailing my thief from time to time that he'd better pay me, lest I write a letter to the judge for his court date in January...but it is a coincidence that leaves me feeling all warm, fuzzy, and in the holiday spirit nonetheless. In fact, it was so warm and fuzzy a feeling that I got even warmer and fuzzier, contacting the son of the guy who did a hit-and-run on my car and telling him I was on the verge of taking his dad to small claims court to collect on the hours I spent tracking his dad's slimey ass down...or they could...settle!
TO BE CONTINUED!
PS Eric Drew's foundation is here.
"Beverly Hills Adjacent"?
As I wrote in a recent column, "Beverly Hills Adjacent" is a Los Angeles real estate advertising term I've always found amusing -- an attempt to lure those who dream of living in the heart of Beverly Hills, but on a budget more akin to renting a boil on the ass of South Central. Unfortunately, the story behind the tent is not so funny.
What Separation Of Church And State?
How come you can't get a drink on Sunday in some places, even if you don't worship The Great Imaginary Friend? Zlati Meyer writes in the Detroit Free Press:
Detroit on Sunday was in the holiday spirit.From the Palace of Auburn Hills to downtown casinos and in the handful of restaurants open on Christmas, people complained about the statewide Christmas ban on alcohol sales.
"It's terrible," said Jerry Gazda, angry that he couldn't get a whiskey Manhattan at the MGM Grand Detroit Casino while he played the slots and blackjack. "I have no family. I came here for entertainment, to have drinks."
Upset at what he considered the law's Big-Brother feel, the 55-year-old technical writer from Detroit said he was considering a trip to Windsor. He said Christmas shouldn't mean "no drinks," especially for atheists like him.
Allen Park native Charles Herman isn't a fan of the law, either.
The 26-year-old Chicago resident is home for the holidays, and bemoaned the fact that the law gives him one less way to relax on an already limiting day.
"If I came here later with friends, I would like to have some beers," said Herman, who was buying a gift at the MGM Grand on Sunday. "There's not much open."
The Michigan Liquor Control Commission's rule prevents the sale of alcohol from 9 p.m. Dec. 24 until 7 a.m. Dec. 26.
Attention: You're now free to go back to mewling about how persecuted all the Christians supposedly feel when some department store clerk says "happy holidays."
Dogs And Rimadyl Don't Necessarily Mix
On the off chance your vet wants to give your dog Rimadyl, or some other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug -- it just killed the dog of somebody we know. In veterinary medicine, and in all medicine, take what you hear with a grain of...five hours of Web research, or thereabouts. Doctors and vets aren't necessarily up on the latest studies in the field, and maybe haven't looked at much of anything published since they left med/vet school, relying on drug reps to tell them what does and doesn't work. Now, this doesn't describe all doctors or vets, but does it describe yours? Better to find out before you or your pet buy the farm, huh?
King George Again
America escaped the tyranny of King George, only to fall under the tyranny of King George Bush. Fantastic column in the Miami Herald by Robert Steinback, "Fear destroys what bin Laden could not." Go to the link and read the whole thing. Here's an excerpt:
President Bush recently confirmed that he has authorized wiretaps against U.S. citizens on at least 30 occasions and said he'll continue doing it. His justification? He, as president -- or is that king? -- has a right to disregard any law, constitutional tenet or congressional mandate to protect the American people.Is that America's highest goal -- preventing another terrorist attack? Are there no principles of law and liberty more important than this? Who would have remembered Patrick Henry had he written, "What's wrong with giving up a little liberty if it protects me from death?''
Bush would have us excuse his administration's excesses in deference to the ''war on terror'' -- a war, it should be pointed out, that can never end. Terrorism is a tactic, an eventuality, not an opposition army or rogue nation. If we caught every person guilty of a terrorist act, we still wouldn't know where tomorrow's first-time terrorist will strike. Fighting terrorism is a bit like fighting infection -- even when it's beaten, you must continue the fight or it will strike again.
Are we agreeing, then, to give the king unfettered privilege to defy the law forever? It's time for every member of Congress to weigh in: Do they believe the president is above the law, or bound by it?
Bush stokes our fears, implying that the only alternative to doing things his extralegal way is to sit by fitfully waiting for terrorists to harm us. We are neither weak nor helpless. A proud, confident republic can hunt down its enemies without trampling legitimate human and constitutional rights.
Ultimately, our best defense against attack -- any attack, of any sort -- is holding fast and fearlessly to the ideals upon which this nation was built. Bush clearly doesn't understand or respect that. Do we?
Where To Get Help Abusing Your Child
The sickos at "Focus On The Family" very openly advocate what should be considered a jailable offense for child abuse -- sending your (stereotypically) gay kid to "ex-gay" counseling:
From James Dobsons' Focus on the Family's "Focus on Your Child" website:Helping Boys Become Men, and Girls Become Women
Is My Child Becoming Homosexual?
Before puberty, children aren’t normally heterosexual or homosexual. They’re definitely gender conscious. But young children are not sexual beings yet — unless something sexual in nature has interrupted their developmental phases.
Still, it’s not uncommon for children to experience gender confusion during the elementary school years. Dr. Joseph Nicolosi reports, “In one study of 60 effeminate boys ages 4 to 11, 98 percent of them engaged in cross-dressing, and 83 percent said they wished they had been born a girl.”
Evidences of gender confusion or doubt in boys ages 5 to 11 may include:
1. A strong feeling that they are “different” from other boys.
2. A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.
3. A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.
4. A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in their games and other pastimes.
5. A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them “queer,” “fag” and “gay.”
6. A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even “think” effeminately.
7. A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.
If your child is experiencing several signs of gender confusion, professional help is available. It’s best to seek that help before your child reaches puberty.
Why isn't this against the law -- as a form of child abuse? How many of these kids who go through this counseling kill themselves because of it? I don't know the answer -- just wondering. Here's an excerpt from statement from the former (so-called) "Love In Action" co-founder John Evans:
"My Ministry Shatters Lives"uthor Wayne Besen released an explosive letter today by Love In Action's co-founder and former ex-gay John Evans, which rebukes gay conversion groups saying that they "shattered lives". The group he started has recently made headlines because it runs a boot camp for gay teens called "Refuge" that tries to turn adolescents heterosexual, often against their will.
"In the past 30 years since leaving the 'ex-gay' ministry I have seen nothing but shattered lives, depression and even suicide among those connected with the 'ex-gay' movement," Evans writes in his letter to John Smid, Love In Action's current director. "I challenge Christians to investigate all sides of the issue of being gay and Christian. The Church has been wrong in the past regarding moral issues and I'm sure there will be more before Christ returns."
Evans, a gay man, founded what may be the first modern ex-gay group in San Rafael, Calif. in 1973, along with a heterosexual preacher Kent Philpott. Evans left his life partner of ten years to start the gay conversion group. He later dropped out after he realized it didn't work and his best friend committed suicide because he could not turn heterosexual.
"Having the founder of Love In Action step forward to admonish the ministry he started speaks to the utter hopelessness and futility of these groups, not to mention the danger they represent," said Wayne Besen, Author of Anything But Straight: Unmasking the Scandals and Lies Behind the Ex-Gay Myth (Haworth, 2003). "Most disturbing are the compulsory gay boot camps for teens which are tantamount to child abuse. They should immediately be shut down."
In May, 16-year old Zach told his fundamentalist Christian parents that he is gay. Horrified by the news, they vowed to fix him by sending him to an "ex-gay" boot camp in Memphis to be reprogrammed. Like a modern day message in a bottle, Zach used his Internet blog to send an SOS.
"I told my parents I was gay," he wrote. "This didn't go over very well," and "They tell me that there is something psychologically wrong with me, and they 'raised me wrong.' Today, my mother, father and I had a very long talk in my room, where they let me know I am to apply for a fundamentalist Christian program for gays."
The next day, Zach threw another bottle into the cyber-sea.
"It's like boot camp. If I do come out straight, I'll be so mentally unstable and depressed it won't matter."
You can counsel me all you want, and it's not going to make me hot for short men or skinny men or make me like celery, green peppers, coffee ice cream or eggplant. Or start chasing chicks. I imagine telling girls who are into girls that it's time to get into men doesn't work too well, either. How well would it work on you, somebody telling you that whatever you find attractive in other humans is wrong and shameful? Is that going to make you attracted to some other quality that you now find unappealing? Or is it just going to make you feel like there's no way out?
Can we turn the clocks back any faster than we already are? At this rate, in a few years, I'm a bit worried I'll be barefoot, pregnant, and bent over a spinning wheel.
Al Einstein's Ethics
"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectively on sympathy, education, and social relationships; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." --Albert Einstein, NYTimes Mag, November 9, 1930
Saddles For Dinosaurs
Stupid people can reasonably be expected to behave stupidly, which is just what the "intelligent design" nitwits did in pressing the issue, writes U of Rochester med school prof James Ringo on Tech Central Station:
The problem can be seen if one imagines, as a simple thought experiment that one is an aggressive atheist planning a propaganda campaign to capture the minds of the young. Such a campaign might look like the following. Begin by tying the question of the existence of God to some poorly supported theory of biology. Next, set up a joint presentation of this weak theory with, and in comparison to, the Darwinian theory of evolution which can and has been demonstrated in the laboratory with short generational microorganisms (both mutation and selection of the “fit” are observed) and has a world of data and modeling support. Finally, have this contest presented, refereed and commented on… by a Darwinist, as the bulk of biology teachers surely are. Diabolical no? Yet such a campaign is not far from what has been happening in Dover, PA, in Kansas and elsewhere.Besides making a tactical misjudgment, those trying to force ID into the biology classroom are making a scientific misjudgment. This is a misunderstanding about how scientific disputes are settled and the status of the opposing theories.
There is no court that decides when a scientific hypothesis graduates to become a theory and when a theory is accepted as a law. But if there were such a court the theory of evolution would be called the law of evolution. The assurance biologists (including me) place in Darwinian evolution is demonstrated when we regularly bet our careers on evolution being right. These bets take the form of basing new experiments on, among other things, principles from evolutionary theory. For example, I have spent years on experiments which derived from an idea that a brain memory mechanism found in rodents would be preserved, expanded and adapted in the monkey. I followed this line of work because I am convinced of the general correctness of Darwinian evolution. Such conviction is essentially universal among the professors at major national research universities.
Now it is conceivable that all those biologists are wrong. Scientific revolutions have occurred before. The overwhelming bulk of attempts to overthrow established scientific law, however, come up empty, and usually with far less publicity than (say) Cold Fusion received.
The key to this kind of revolution is to find some inexplicable experiment or fact which is utterly incompatible with the current scientific understanding. If the proponents of ID would actually demonstrate (instead of simply assert) that the flagella or some other structure is irreducibly complex and could not have evolved then they would have met such a test. In fact, the “irreducible complexity” of the flagella, while asserted by ID proponents, is not holding up well. One (nicely reduced) candidate component of the flagella, which has an important function of its own and could also serve as a ‘way station’ on an evolutionary pathway to the more complex flagella, is a secretory structure with substantial homologies, discussed here.
This specific, detailed and technical dispute is exactly what should be happening. The first place to dispute evolutionary theory is in the laboratory. If proponents of ID show some success there, young Turks will flock to such a potential scientific revolution as Nobel Prizes beckon. At that point, basic texts in biology should (and will) attend to the issue, not before.
"I Take It Up The Bum" Jewelry
Aww, how charming. Now, you can buy a chastity ring, like this "14K Yellow Gold Unblossomed Rose Chastity Ring for Ladies," to show off your pledge not to have sex before marriage. Why don't they shorten the name to "Women As Chattel Jewelry"? It's catchier, and more to the point. Of course, just because a lady's wearing a gold band or a rock doesn't mean she won't be getting her rocks off -- and maybe via the back door!
Bill Maher explains what chastity pledges really lead to on Salon (irritating commercial viewing req'd):
New Rule: Abstinence pledges make you horny. A new eight-year study just released reveals that American teenagers who take "virginity" pledges of the sort so favored by the Bush administration wind up with just as many STDs as the other kids.But that's not all -- taking the pledges also makes a teenage girl six times more likely to perform oral sex, and a boy four times more likely to get anal. Which leads me to an important question: where were these pledges when I was in high school?
Seriously, when I was a teenager, the only kids having anal intercourse were the ones who missed. My idea of lubrication was oiling my bike chain. If I had known I could have been getting porn star sex the same year I took Algebra II, simply by joining up with the Christian right, I'd have been so down with Jesus they would have had to pry me out of the pew.For a bunch of teens raised on creationism, these red state kids today are pretty evolved -- sexually, anyway, and for that they can thank all who joined forces to try and legislate away human nature, specifically the ineluctable urge of teenagers to hump.
Yes, the "What do we tell the children?" crowd apparently decided not to tell them anything. Because people who talk about pee-pees are potty-mouths. And so armed with limited knowledge, and believing regular, vaginal intercourse to be either immaculate or filthy dirty, these kids did with their pledge what everybody does with contracts: they found loopholes. Two of them to be exact.
First of all, I hate the term "losing your virginity," which makes it sound like you might have left it at the mall when you put down your shopping bag. Quite frankly, it really isn't the big deal it's cracked up to be. When I was growing up, my mother simply suggested that "premarital sex" wasn't such a good idea, or something equally vague, and that was that. That's probably why I didn't have actual sexual intercourse until I was about 22, with a boyfriend-turned-friend, in his parents' cabin in Morristown, NJ. It really was no big deal. In fact, it was pretty funny, and that friend now has a boyfriend of his own. Oops! Seriously, had somebody been giving out rings for remaining "chaste" when I was a teen, I would probably have been in much more of a rush. Idiots. Idjuts.
The Little Red Book Was A Little White Lie
The student who said the Feds hit on him for requesting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book? Seems he made the whole thing up, Aaron Nicodemus reports. (The student must've been snorting stem cells at the time):
The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for "The Little Red Book" by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story.
The 22-year-old student tearfully admitted he made the story up to his history professor, Dr. Brian Glyn Williams, and his parents, after being confronted with the inconsistencies in his account.
Had the student stuck to his original story, it might never have been proved false.
But on Thursday, when the student told his tale in the office of UMass Dartmouth professor Dr. Robert Pontbriand to Dr. Williams, Dr. Pontbriand, university spokesman John Hoey and The Standard-Times, the student added new details.
The agents had returned, the student said, just last night. The two agents, the student, his parents and the student's uncle all signed confidentiality agreements, he claimed, to put an end to the matter.
But when Dr. Williams went to the student's home yesterday and relayed that part of the story to his parents, it was the first time they had heard it. The story began to unravel, and the student, faced with the truth, broke down and cried.
Making Assumptions
In this case, the assumption that members of Congress, Senators, and those in The White House can read, or will read more than polls proclaiming their own greatness:
George Orwell was right after all.In 1949, Orwell penned "1984," a dark, futuristic satire in which the totalitarian government used indoctrination, propaganda and fear to enforce order and conformity. His "Big Brother" — the face of this all-knowing regime — was never wrong, and to make sure of it, history was constantly being rewritten.
Orwell wrote his book as a cautionary tale to underscore the insidious danger of slowly eroded individual liberties. His Thought Police may not yet be on the march, but it's not hyperbole to point out the eerie parallels with today's America.
In America today, Big Brother is watching.
He's watching because President Bush told him to. Shortly after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens making or receiving international calls and e-mails.
When it comes to fighting terror, Bush is totalitarian — remember, you're either with us or against us. Trust me to get it right, he says. Debate on the law is not only not needed, it's evil.
"An open debate about the law would say to the enemy, 'Here's what we're going to do.'" Bush said recently. "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."
Then there's the Patriot Act, also created in the days immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. The Senate and House of Representatives voted Thursday to extend the law by a month. President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insist it's an indispensable tool in the war on terror and want it extended permanently.
"I'm as concerned about the privacy of American citizens as anyone, but we cannot allow libraries and use of libraries to become safe havens for terrorists," Gonzales said in July, defending one of the act's most controversial provisions.
Remember, too, that we invaded Iraq primarily because we were told Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat with his weapons of mass destruction. Now the Bush administration acknowledges that wasn't so, but insists there were (are?) other reasons to invade. History is malleable.
Orwell wrote of war without end; we're told the war on terror will last decades at least. Orwell wrote of a dumbed-down "Newspeak," and who could argue that our national discourse hasn't slumped? Orwell's "Ministry of Love" tortured dissidents real or imagined; our government decries Iraq's secret torture prisons while arguing over whether to ban torture. Meanwhile, we maintain our own secret CIA prisons.
Bush is unapologetic. The president believes he has the legal authority to spy on American citizens without a warrant, and he plans to continue to reauthorize the program "for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens." But when the enemy is poorly defined, who determines when the threat is over? In this case, the same government that secretly taps our phones.
Turns out the truth is no stranger than fiction.
We think it's time for Congress to heed the warning of George Orwell.
To that end, we're asking for your help: Mail us or drop off your tattered copies of "1984." When we get 537 of them, we'll send them to every member of the House of Representatives and Senate and to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Feel free to inscribe the book with a note, reminding these fine people that we Americans take the threat to our liberties seriously. Remind Congress that it makes no sense to fight a war for democracy in a foreign land while allowing our democratic principles to erode at home.
Remind President Bush that ours is a country of checks and balances, not unbridled power.
Perhaps our nation's leaders can find some truth in this fiction and more carefully ponder the road we're traveling.
Virgin (Bwah-Hah-Hah!) Birth
Okay, you're 16, and you get knocked up. Do you tell your dad, it was Jimmy, the thug from next door, or..."God did it!"? Chloe Breyer on Slate on "What if Mary wasn't a virgin?"
At Christmas, Christians celebrate the birth of God's only son. Some believers, however, wonder if Jesus Christ is God's son only. The ancient "illegitimacy tradition" and its modern proponents propose that Jesus may have had a human father. That idea upsets one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith—the virgin conception. But it's entirely in keeping with more essential tenets: Jesus' role as the Messiah, and God's love for the poor and downtrodden. What's more, the illegitimacy tradition responds to many strange utterances about Jesus' birth in the Scriptures themselves.Christians agree that Jesus was not conceived by Mary and Joseph while they were married. He was born so soon after Joseph took Mary into his home that it was clear she had conceived during her betrothal to Joseph. Beginning in the second century, most Christians explained the scandalously timed birth as evidence of the virgin conception. Christian leaders were still figuring out Jesus' identity at the time, and the virgin conception offered evidence of the Messiah's exceptionalism. It also made sense that if Jesus was both fully human and fully God, he should have one human parent and one divine one.
The illegitimacy tradition, by contrast, holds that the Holy Spirit supplemented, rather than replaced, Jesus' human paternity. Justin Martyr, a second-century Christian theologian, wrote of early Christians born as Jews who believed that Jesus was the natural son of Mary and Joseph. Origen, another early church father, referred to two branches of first-century Jewish Christians, collectively called the Ebionites, "the one confessing as we do that Jesus was born of a virgin, the other holding that he was not born in this way but like other men." The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas includes an enigmatic saying that may well refer to Jesus: "He who knows the father and the mother will be called the son of a harlot."
..Can a loyal Christian believe that Christ was not born of a biological virgin? Perhaps it's worth posing a different question: Why is church authority so intent upon Mary's virginity as a historical fact? Would Jesus be any less God's son if he had an earthly father? The central message of the Gospel is that God raised up and redeemed his servant from death by crucifixion—the Roman style of execution reserved for the lowest of the low. Why couldn't God have sent the same message of divine solidarity with the world's outcasts by making a Messiah out of a man whose conception was also taboo?
Some church leaders feel the pull of the illegitimacy tradition but fear its impact. "Undoubtedly, some sophisticated Christians could live with the alternative … [but] for many less sophisticated believers, illegitimacy would be an offense that would challenge the plausibility of the Christian Mystery," Brown writes.
Come on, all you religious people out there, you can't really believe this stuff. Admit it. Admit that you just don't apply much (or any) rational thought to it. Stop keeping this little square of irrationality in your life. Once you stop believing in the supernatural, you can really live. Take me, for example. I don't believe in heaven or hell (except maybe hell on earth, when your brat is screaming in my ear at Trader Joe's). As far as I can see, all I've got is as long as I'm alive, so I truly live in the now, and I'm sure not going to waste that "now" in church on some hard bench swearing my allegiance to an imaginary friend!
Street Shark
1964 Caddy, Santa Monica, 2005.
Geezer Burns
He's 53, she's 27, what's the problem? I just posted a new Advice Goddess column on age differences. Here's an excerpt:
Okay, it is kind of a drag to have both a baby and a husband in diapers. This could happen to you -- but only if you toss your eggs and his sperm into Ziploc baggies in some fertility doctor’s freezer, and grow a fetus in a Mason jar when you’re 60 and he’s 86. On the plus side, think of all the great stories the old man could tell the kid about his own childhood -- back when people were discovering fire and inventing the wheel.Aging isn’t what it used to be, and not just because plastic surgeons are crossing people’s jowls over their backs and tacking them to their shoulder blades. So, numerically, your boyfriend’s got 26 years on you. These days, there are 65-year-old punks on skateboards -- although there’s occasionally some confusion as to whether wanting a joint means being in the mood for pot or in need of a new knee.
Sure, the day may come when “Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag” because he’s had a colostomy, when “Abs of Steel” become abs of a Shar-Pei, or when you no longer put on fishnet thigh-highs to play nursie, because he generally isn’t awake while you’re emptying his bedpan. Then again, there are obese, chain-smoking, “age-appropriate” men whose hearts give out at 40 from rigorous sex -- not having it, just thinking about it.
Maybe youth really is wasted on the young, since it takes a much older man to truly appreciate a hot young girlfriend: “Yeah, baby…who’s yer Granddaddy?!” What does a 27-year-old guy have that your boyfriend doesn’t? Probably a lot of confusion about who he is and what he wants, and a driving ambition to sort it out -- even if it means staying up all night doing Jell-O shots and having sex with your best friend.
The rest is here.
The War On Sanity
Dr. Kevorkian is rotting in prison, and likely to die there. Here's a story on his plight by Tracy Ward of the suburban Detroit Oakland Press:
He's nearly 76 years old now, a man who tried to change the world, only to be forced to watch from behind bars as the cause he championed plods forward without him.And that's where Jack Kevorkian believes he'll die - in prison.
"There's no doubt I expect to die in prison," said Kevorkian, talking from a pay phone outside his prison cell at the Thumb Correctional Facility in Lapeer. "All the big powers they've silenced me. ... So much for free speech and choice on this fundamental human right."
Talking for the first time since he was sent to prison in 1999, Kevorkian told The Daily Oakland Press about prison life, the torturous boredom and his fellow inmates. He spoke about why there has been no hue and cry for his release. Not from the public. Not from the Hemlock Society. Not even from the families of those he helped to die.
If he feels forsaken by the people he tried to help, Kevorkian won't acknowledge it - even as he sits alone behind steel bars and concrete walls, imprisoned by the razor-topped wire fence outside.
"No, I don't feel abandoned; I knew what I was doing," he said, in the 15-minute telephone interview. "Look, it's OK. They're frightened. They won't do anything. I knew that. I didn't do this for other people; I did this for me. I fought for this right for me - does that sound selfish?
"The American people are sheep. They're comfortable, rich, working. It's like the Romans, they're happy with bread and their spectator sports. The Super Bowl means more to them than any right."
All told, it is estimated Kevorkian, tagged "Dr. Death" by the media, helped more than 130 people to their deaths during the 1990s. In a volatile, sometimes circuslike atmosphere, he was arrested and acquitted and arrested again.
His critics charged he was ghoulish, fascinated with death. Admirers lauded his bravery.
But those from both sides agree the odd, thin-faced retired Royal Oak pathologist, alongside his former attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, nearly single-handedly forced the nation to confront the issue of doctor-assisted suicide and the suffering endured by terminal patients.
In the end, it was the 1998 CBS "60 Minutes" broadcast of the death of Lou Gehrig's disease patient Thomas Youk that brought Kevorkian's work to an end. He was sentenced in 1999 to 10-25 years on second-degree murder charges.
Today, prisoner No. 284797, who wears a navy blue jumpsuit with an orange stripe, is living in a 7-by-11-foot cell with a radio, his books and crosswords. Never married, with no children, Kevorkian will be eligible for parole in 2007 when he is 79 years old.
Kevorkian's attorney Mayer Morganroth, a $600-an-hour attorney who befriended Kevorkian and represents him for less money because he believes in what Kevorkian advocated, is hoping the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will review Kevorkian's conviction. Unlike Fieger, Morganroth shut down the media, though he said Barbara Walters and Mike Wallace still call, hoping for on-camera interviews with Kevorkian.
Morganroth said those early, sometimes vitriolic attacks against judges and political figures hurt his client, but that Kevorkian is a different person now.
But the courts have been immovable.
"In my 50 years of practice, I've never seen anything like this," Morganroth said, shaking his head. "Any other client would be out."
"Look at the forces against me," Kevorkian said, listing the government, the American Medical Association, pharmaceutical companies and religion. "Is there anything more powerful than these four?"
"They don't want me out," he added a few minutes later. "They're afraid I'll cause trouble if I get out."
News on Kevorkian's pretty desperate medical condition is here. Here's a guy who ended the suffering of people who were desperate to have him help them end their suffering. It seems this runs contrary to the primitive religious beliefs favored by many in our country. Their fairy tale books say it's wrong to "kill," so there you have it, Dr. Kevorkian dying in jail for doing the most humane thing he possibly could for these people. A word to all of the rational people out there: Just because there are more of them than there are of us doesn't mean they aren't all insane to some degree -- operating on intellectual fairy juice and one step away from thinking Santa Claus is actually going to slide down their chimneys come Christmas eve.
Where The Wild Things Were...Again
No, it isn't exactly the food version of WWIII on this table, but people with children should realize that Starbucks isn't Lutece -- they don't have a small army of busboys running around with those little crumb spatulas to clean up between courses or patrons.
Osama Bin Bunny
Don't be marching for peace or poverty relief, and don't be one of the PETA nitwits! Democracy Now's Amy Goodman talks to three reps from domestic groups discovered to have been under FBI counterterrorism surveillance, Jeff Kerr, General Counsel and Director of Corporate Affairs of PETA, Matt Daloisio of the New York Catholic Worker; and John Passacantando, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA:
JOHN PASSACANTANDO: ...We know that the F.B.I., since January 1, 2000, gathered approximately 2,400 pages of information on Greenpeace. This is everything from copies of web pages to reports by corporate-funded think tanks doing analysis of Greenpeace; it's clippings; it's write ups of protests, peaceful protests that we have engaged in; and that's about half of it. The other half of it has been redacted. It's blanked-out pages. So you can't tell if there's eavesdropping. You cannot tell if there's intercepted email traffic. You simply can’t tell; you get multiple boxes of photocopied paper, and only half of them actually have the print still on them.AMY GOODMAN: Jeff Kerr, you're with PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. We have been looking at documents that are almost fully redacted, except for the name of PETA.
JEFF KERR: Good morning, Amy. Yes, you're right. What the documents show, as far as we can tell, is a gross abuse of power and a waste of resources, as the F.B.I. investigates and infiltrates an organization that it admits in these documents is a lawful charity engaged in First Amendment-protected free speech activity. It's outrageous, and this kind of secret spying has got to stop.
AMY GOODMAN: What exactly do you understand the F.B.I. has been doing in your case?
JEFF KERR: Well, to the extent we can glean it from the documents, we know they're surveilling speeches on college campuses. We know they have gone to some of our protests on public sidewalks, where people are laying naked in a cage to protest cruelty in the fur trade, and we know that they have harassed and questioned our employees on roadsides, and we know they have gone to their homes and businesses to interview them. There's really just such a wasteful type of threat that comes through this, and one indication in one of the documents, Amy, there's reference made where they accuse us of being actively involved in a campaign against a company that we had protested six years before that and hadn't done anything previously. You know, the American people know the difference between a terrorist and somebody in a chicken suit handing out a leaflet against KFC's practices. But the F.B.I. apparently doesn't seem to know that.
AMY GOODMAN: Matt Daloisio, you're with the New York Catholic Worker. What have you read in the documents?
MATT DALOISIO: From the documents I’ve seen, it looks like the F.B.I. was concerned with the Los Angeles Catholic Worker and their work around Vandenberg Air Force Base and National Missile Defense. Mostly, it seems just sad that the F.B.I. would use resources to investigate a group that's always open about what we do and take responsibility for what we do and is really based in a faith that believes in the God-given dignity of every human being.
AMY GOODMAN: The documents refer to the Catholic Worker’s semi-communist ideology.
MATT DALOISIO: Yes, I guess if we are against war and working with people who are poor, that makes us semi-communistic.
Hitchens' Bah Humbug
The strange writhings of people bent on claiming Winter Solstice as a holy, national holiday, by Christopher Hitchens on Slate:
...I was invited onto Scarborough Country on MSNBC to debate the proposition that reindeer were an ancient symbol of Christianity and thus deserving of First Amendment protection, if not indeed of mandatory display at every mall in the land. I am told that nobody watches that show anymore—certainly I heard from almost nobody who had seen it—so I must tell you that the view taken by the host was that coniferous trees were also a symbol of Christianity, and that the Founding Fathers had endorsed this proposition. From his cue cards, he even quoted a few vaguely deistic sentences from Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, neither of them remotely Christian in tone. When I pointed out the latter, and added that Christmas trees, yule logs, and all the rest were symbols of the winter solstice "holidays" before any birth had been registered in the greater Bethlehem area, I was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough's increasingly desperate staff. And when I added that it wasn't very Tiny Tim-like to invite a seasonal guest and then tell him to shut up, I was told that I was henceforth stricken from the Scarborough Rolodex. The ultimate threat: no room at the Bigmouth Inn.This was a useful demonstration of what I have always hated about the month of December: the atmosphere of a one-party state. On all media and in all newspapers, endless invocations of the same repetitive theme. In all public places, from train stations to department stores, an insistent din of identical propaganda and identical music. The collectivization of gaiety and the compulsory infliction of joy. Time wasted on foolishness at one's children's schools. Vapid ecumenical messages from the president, who has more pressing things to do and who is constitutionally required to avoid any religious endorsements.
...A revealing mark of their insecurity is (Christian enthusiasts) rage when public places are not annually given over to religious symbolism, and now, their fresh rage when palaces of private consumption do not follow suit. The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets—whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy—is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell—my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist—to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.
No believer in the First Amendment could go that far. But there are millions of well-appointed buildings all across the United States, most of them tax-exempt and some of them receiving state subventions, where anyone can go at any time and celebrate miraculous births and pregnant virgins all day and all night if they so desire. These places are known as "churches," and they can also force passersby to look at the displays and billboards they erect and to give ear to the bells that they ring. In addition, they can count on numberless radio and TV stations to beam their stuff all through the ether. If this is not sufficient, then god damn them. God damn them everyone.
The cards I ordered yesterday for next year,
and other less in-your-face solstice greetings, available here. And yes, I'll still send Santa with a surfboard cards and the like to those likely to be wounded by the entrance of rationality into the season. For the record, if I know you're Christian, I'll wish you "merry Christmas." If I don't know what you are or suspect you're Jewish, Raelian, or Hari Krishna, I'll say "happy holidays." If I suspect you're thinking enough not to believe in any god, I might even say "reason's greetings." All of the above beat "Get the fuck out of my way!"
Where The Wild Things Were
Media Bias Study Is...Biased!
Well, at the very least, it's pretty ham-handed. Felix Gillette at CJR writes (a day after Andrew Gumbel kicked my ass about this):
...Their methodology still falls short of the ideal bias-detecting machine. To date, their method involves hiring a bunch of college students to comb through some (but not all) of the archives for some (but not all) American news outlets and then counting up some (but not all) references to some (but not all) think tanks and then comparing some (but not all) of these references to the amount of times certain members of the U.S. Congress refer to some (but not all) think tanks. Suffice to say, it's a bulky bit of bias-detection and quite primitive. But with a few tweaks, this new quantitative approach to media criticism will undoubtedly soon replace all the old tools of the industry -- from analogy and analysis, to insight and wit.
The Butler Did It
“Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.” --Samuel Butler, "Unprofessional Sermons," Note-Books, published in 1912
Unchain Your Head
Check out the Freedom From Religion web site here.
Business As Usual At The Rose Cafe
It's Venice. They dress like this in July, too.
P.S. That's Karen Landry smiling in line in the white hat.
D-Minus For The Morons
The stupidity that is "intelligent design" gets failing marks from a federal judge:
A Pennsylvania school district cannot teach in science classes a concept that says some aspects of science were created by a supernatural being, a federal judge has ruled.In an opinion issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge John Jones ruled that teaching "intelligent design" would violate the Constitutional separation of church and state.
"We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents," Jones writes in his 139-page opinion posted on the court's Web site. (Opinion, pdf)
"To be sure, Darwin's theory of evolution is imperfect. However, the fact that a scientific theory cannot yet render an explanation on every point should not be used as a pretext to thrust an untestable alternative hypothesis grounded in religion into the science classroom or to misrepresent well-established scientific propositions," Jones writes.
Intelligent design claims the complexity of some systems of nature cannot be explained by evolution but must be attributed to a designer or supernatural being.
Most unamusingly, the imaginary friend they pick is never the tooth fairy or Barney.
All Is Not Completely Lost
When I’m not busy answering letters from adults who are incapable of writing a complete sentence in correctly spelled English, I sometimes do a speaking engagement. This week, I talked on a panel with Cathy Seipp, TV writer/producer/everything-er Tim Minnear, and two professors about separation of church and state. I, of course, am for it -- what’s left of it. Friday, the House passsed a resolution to “protect” Christmas. An entreaty was made that protection of Hanukah be included in the bill. It was denied. How lovely, that with all the real problems we have in this country and in the world, our representatives are busy, busy, busy passing legislation contrary to the Bill Of Rights.
I spoke, courtesy of Christian Johnson and the Arsalyn Foundation, "promoting youth civic and political engagement," to a ballroom of southern California high school students. Now, I grew up in suburban Detroit, where everybody was white, white, white until junior high school…and even then, I didn’t realize Jamie Leon was Puerto Rican until I went to New York. “Shhh, don’t tell anyone,” he said. Well, it was pretty amazing to walk into a room of almost entirely Asian faces. Cathy’s daughter Maia, who recommended me to Arselyn, and maybe two other kids, were the only non-Asians there. Pretty incredible to see.
Anyway, the most exciting part of this for me (in addition to reports that I was actually coherent), was the level of interest and intelligence of all the kids there. For starters, as Christian noted, they were spending their Saturday night listening to a discussion about religion and the Constitution. but also, they asked really good questions. One guy in particular, who looked to be of Mexican origin -- actually, he looked like he walked out of a drawing of the Aztecs -- asked particularly smart questions, which showed me that he didn’t just suck down everything he was told. Because time ran out, I didn’t get in what would have been my parting remark to the kids: “Don’t settle for hand-me-down thinking or values” -- something all kids should be taught.
Oh, So Now Being Homosexual Is A Security Risk?
What's next, bike riding? Eating cheese? Drinking Dr. Pepper? The miltary is spying on gay rights groups:
The recent revelation that the U.S. military is spying on gay rights groups, say historians, evokes the Cold War crackdowns on gays during the McCarthy era, academics say.Then, as now, the government compiled lists of American citizens who were suspected of subversive activity by virtue of their association with critics of government policy. Targets included gays and members of gay or gay-friendly groups.
Last week, NBC News reported it had obtained sections of a secret Pentagon database with information about individuals linked to peaceful activist and protest groups that opposed certain U.S. military actions.
But according to David K. Johnson, a historian at University of South Florida and author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, the banner of “national security” has long been used as a pretext to crack down on gay rights and even to spark moral crusades against homosexuality under the guise of national defense.
His book explains that “security risk” was used throughout the Cold War to invoke “the specter of homosexuality,” which was cast as a threat to national security, and as something that “needed to be systematically removed” from the government and minimized in the culture at large.
As far as is known, the current surveillance does not target homosexuality itself, but rather gay groups which have voiced opposition to the “don't ask, don't tell” policy barring openly gay service.
But as described in Johnson’s book, the historical pattern for thwarting gay freedom has been “guilt by association.”
Joseph McCarthy singled out Americans who read Communist literature, and took aim at gays because they “had extremely close connections with other individuals with the same tendencies.” The McCarthy era was also known for keeping lists of individuals deemed “security risks” because they had a history of alcoholism, Liberalism, disloyalty and even “loquaciousness.”
Dr. Johnson said the Pentagon’s spying is the latest in a long history of targeting gays and lesbians as subversives, despite lacking any evidence for such a charge.
“It's no surprise,” he said. “The federal government began spying on those who challenged its discriminatory policies from the very earliest days of such activism.”
He said the FBI investigated the first organizational meeting in 1961 of what became the Mattachine Society, one of the earliest gay rights groups. Government agents took photographs in 1965 at the first gay and lesbian public demonstration in front of the White House against the military’s exclusionary policies.
“What is surprising,” he continued, “is that in nearly a half century of undercover intelligence gathering, they haven’t yet figured out that these are always peaceful, lawful protests.”
Our Lawbreaker-In-Chief
By Jonathan Alter:
Finally we have a Washington scandal that goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power. President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. I learned this week that on December 6, Bush summoned Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office in a futile attempt to talk them out of running the story. The Times will not comment on the meeting,
but one can only imagine the president’s desperation.The problem was not that the disclosures would compromise national security, as Bush claimed at his press conference. His comparison to the damaging pre-9/11 revelation of Osama bin Laden’s use of a satellite phone, which caused bin Laden to change tactics, is fallacious; any Americans with ties to Muslim extremists—in fact, all American Muslims, period—have long since suspected that the U.S. government might be listening in to their conversations. Bush claimed that “the fact that we are discussing this program is helping the enemy.” But there is simply no evidence, or even reasonable presumption, that this is so. And rather than the leaking being a “shameful act,” it was the work of a patriot inside the government who was trying to stop a presidential power grab.
No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism.
What is especially perplexing about this story is that the 1978 law set up a special court to approve eavesdropping in hours, even minutes, if necessary. In fact, the law allows the government to eavesdrop on its own, then retroactively justify it to the court, essentially obtaining a warrant after the fact. Since 1979, the FISA court has approved tens of thousands of eavesdropping requests and rejected only four. There was no indication the existing system was slow—as the president seemed to claim in his press conference—or in any way required extra-constitutional action.
Sorry, George, but the cowboy act only plays almost all the time.
Hmm, come to think of it, didn't illegal wiretaps get some guy named Nixon impeached, back in the day? But, as the Doug Ireland link just above notes, don't be too fast to cast a kind eye on the Democrats or to high-five The New York Times:
...Bush had plenty of bipartisan help from Democratic co-conspirators in keeping knowledge of this illegal spying from reaching the American public. It began in November 2001, in the wake of 9/11, and -- from the very first briefing for Congressional leaders by Dick Cheney until today -- Democrats on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees were told about it. Those witting and complicit in hiding the crime included Democratic Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, former chairman and later ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, former ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee. They knew it was a crime -- Rockefeller, for example, warned the administration against it -- and yet did not make it public. They were frightened by polls showing security hysteria at its height.Worse, the New York Times itself was part of the coverup. When it broke its scoop last Friday, the Times in its article admitted that, "After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted."
Dangerous Thoughts
A look at Mao's Little Red Book gets a student a visit from the Feds, writes Aaron Nicodemus:
A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's tome on Communism called "The Little Red Book."
Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library's interlibrary loan program.
The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand's class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents' home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.
The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a "watch list," and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.
"I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book," Professor Pontbriand said. "Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that's what triggered the visit, as I understand it."
Although The Standard-Times knows the name of the student, he is not coming forward because he fears repercussions should his name become public. He has not spoken to The Standard-Times.
Hummer Lovin'
And the livin' ain't so easy. A blogger gets his graphing calculater going to see how well the Bummers on one Thousand Oaks, CA, lot are selling.
Left-Wing Media Bias Is For Real
At The Wall Street Journal. Sure, the opinion page is right-wing. But, the news pages are not only liberal, but "even more liberal than The New York Times." So found the authors of a media bias study out of UCLA:
The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost all major media outlets tilt to the left.These are just a few of the surprising findings from a UCLA-led study, which is believed to be the first successful attempt at objectively quantifying bias in a range of media outlets and ranking them accordingly.
"I suspected that many media outlets would tilt to the left because surveys have shown that reporters tend to vote more Democrat than Republican," said Tim Groseclose, a UCLA political scientist and the study's lead author. "But I was surprised at just how pronounced the distinctions are."
"Overall, the major media outlets are quite moderate compared to members of Congress, but even so, there is a quantifiable and significant bias in that nearly all of them lean to the left," said co‑author Jeffrey Milyo, University of Missouri economist and public policy scholar.
The results appear in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, which will become available in mid-December.
Groseclose and Milyo based their research on a standard gauge of a lawmaker's support for liberal causes. Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) tracks the percentage of times that each lawmaker votes on the liberal side of an issue. Based on these votes, the ADA assigns a numerical score to each lawmaker, where "100" is the most liberal and "0" is the most conservative. After adjustments to compensate for disproportionate representation that the Senate gives to low‑population states and the lack of representation for the District of Columbia, the average ADA score in Congress (50.1) was assumed to represent the political position of the average U.S. voter.
Groseclose and Milyo then directed 21 research assistants — most of them college students — to scour U.S. media coverage of the past 10 years. They tallied the number of times each media outlet referred to think tanks and policy groups, such as the left-leaning NAACP or the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.
Next, they did the same exercise with speeches of U.S. lawmakers. If a media outlet displayed a citation pattern similar to that of a lawmaker, then Groseclose and Milyo's method assigned both a similar ADA score.
"A media person would have never done this study," said Groseclose, a UCLA political science professor, whose research and teaching focuses on the U.S. Congress. "It takes a Congress scholar even to think of using ADA scores as a measure. And I don't think many media scholars would have considered comparing news stories to congressional speeches."
Of the 20 major media outlets studied, 18 scored left of center, with CBS' "Evening News," The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times ranking second, third and fourth most liberal behind the news pages of The Wall Street Journal.
Only Fox News' "Special Report With Brit Hume" and The Washington Times scored right of the average U.S. voter.
The most centrist outlet proved to be the "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer." CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and ABC's "Good Morning America" were a close second and third.
WHO Is Smoking Crack?
I don't usually link to amateur Christmas poems in people's family newsletters, but I'll make an exception for this little horror called The Grinch Factor in a now corporate-owned famiy newsletter with pretty wide circulation:
THE WHOS down in Who-villeWere a tolerant lot:
Who Christians, Who Muslims — a Who melting pot.
Who Hindus! Who atheists! Who Buddhists, Who Jews!
Who Confucians, Who pagans,
And even Who Druze! The Who 1st Amendment's Establishment Clause
Said, "No creches in courts," and the Whos loved their laws.
Because somehow … they worked. The Whos rarely fought,
Mostly, each Who did just what he ought.
Every Who down in Who-ville
Loved the Consti-Who-tion a lot.
But the O'Reilly, who lived up in Fox-ville,
Did NOT!
The O'Reilly DETESTED the Who Consti-Who-tion,
He thought it was some sort of liberal pollution...(the horror continues at the link above)
Note to the author: If it were biologically possible for Dr. Seuss to reconstitute himself and rise up from the grave and throttle you, I suspect he would.
Stop, Thief! (Uh, We Mean "Valued Customer")
A few Christmas shopping questions from Consumerist.com, a new site I read when I really should be writing:
Do you let retail security people check your bags? What about the whole ‘sign off on your receipt’ thing? And, most importantly, does a person have to submit to those checks?
You can't post comments there, but you can post them here! (Apparently, they're trying to keep the place civilized. I, of course, have no such concerns.)
Backward Is Forward
When I was driving my Rambler (in between its visits to now-rich mechanics), I kept wondering why carmakers making all these hideous new cars didn't just go back to some of their old designs but remake them with modern guts in them. Well, at least GM is finally to be coming to the conclusion idea that cool design might sell cars. When you read stories about autoworkers out of jobs, recognize that it's directly linked to the level of moronism high up in the car companies. Um, duh, build something people are excited to buy. Real hard, boys:
Now GM is looking back to the 1950s for inspiration as it tries to recover from declining market share and a seemingly unbreakable reliance on cash incentives to sell cars.Not that future Chevrolets will necessarily sprout tail fins or dozens of pounds of glittering chrome, but they won't look like every other car on the road.
"For a while there I think there was a feeling that people who bought Chevrolets cared about a lot of things but they didn't care a lot about design," said Tom Wilkinson, communications director for GM design.
Eye-catching design has certainly worked for the Chrysler Group of DaimlerChrysler. Cars like the Chrysler 300 and Dodge Magnum sell well without heavy incentives. Both cars are proportioned to look as if they could have driven straight out of a comic book.
...Expect the change to start in the next couple of years.
While no images of the vehicles have been publicly released yet, a look ahead at upcoming Saturns and a look back at the classic Chevys of the 1950s gives an idea of the sort of thing Wilkinson is talking about. And, some experts say, it's just what Chevrolet needs in an era when building better cars just isn't enough.
Saturn, GM's youngest division, has always been known for a kind and gentle dealership experience with no-haggle pricing. It has never been known for particularly desirable or interesting automobiles.
Saturn's new line-up of cars, beginning with the two-seat roadster called the Sky, followed by the Aura sedan. The Vue SUV will also get a new, futuristic look and Saturn will be introducing a larger crossover SUV as well. Saturns are going to start looking very interesting. Much of the vehicles' design will be shared with GM's European Opel brand. The designs will be edgier and more artful than American buyers are used to seeing from GM.
Eeeuw! Eeeuw! Eeeuw!
Guess who's getting "revirginized"? Amy Chozick writes in The Wall Street Journal:
For her 17th wedding anniversary, Jeanette Yarborough wanted to do something special for her husband. In addition to planning a hotel getaway for the weekend, Ms. Yarborough paid a surgeon $5,000 to reattach her hymen, making her appear to be a virgin again."It's the ultimate gift for the man who has everything," says Ms. Yarborough, 40 years old, a medical assistant from San Antonio.
Hymenoplasty, a controversial medical procedure known mostly for its prevalence in the Middle East and Latin America, is becoming popular in the U.S. Although there are no hard data, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons says vaginal surgery, including hymenoplasty, is one of the industry's fastest-growing segments. Gynecologists are marketing hymenoplasty in magazines, local newspapers and online. They report business is booming.
Restoring innocence this way has sparked criticism. Religious groups that value abstinence until marriage say hymen repair is a deception. Some feminists liken hymenoplasty to female genital mutilation. In addition, hymen repair, unlike other types of reconstructive surgery, isn't taught in medical residencies. Some medical associations worry that surgeons might be improperly trained.
"Revirgination" costs as little as $1,800 at Ridgewood Health and Beauty Center, a spa and cosmetic-surgery center in the New York City borough of Queens. To promote the procedure, the center's owner, Cuban-born Esmeralda Vanegas, has given away hymenoplasties on a Spanish-language radio station. She also promotes them in her eponymous magazine, Esmeralda.
Ms. Vanegas isn't a doctor and doesn't perform the procedure. Instead, she leases space to five plastic surgeons. Luis Palma, a doctor at Ridgewood, went to medical school in his native Argentina and was a resident at the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Mass., among other places. Dr. Palma says he performs about five hymen repairs a month at Ridgewood, almost double the number of five years ago.
Ms. Vanegas says many of her patients risk disgracing their families if they're not virgins on their wedding night. Many are Latin American immigrants. "Losing your virginity is like losing a member of your family," Ms. Vanegas says. "We can make it seem like nothing ever happened."
Marco Pelosi II, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Bayonne, N.J., has been performing hymen repair since 1975 but started marketing the procedure only a year and a half ago. He now performs up to 10 repairs a month, compared with just two annually a decade ago.
"No one used to talk about it, but that's changing," Dr. Pelosi says. "Really, it's not like a heart transplant -- it's like a very simple procedure."
Dr. Pelosi says an increasing number of patients are trying to "improve their sex lives" by combining hymen repair with an operation to tighten their vaginas. He says one patient did it to surprise her husband on a second-honeymoon cruise. Another patient, a 51-year-old Manhattan attorney and mother of three, had him reattach her hymen and tighten her vaginal walls in 2003. "I thought it would add that extra sparkle to our marriage," says the woman.
These ladies are way-too-concerned with the wrong flaps of skin. Really wanna add sparkle to your marriage? Lose 20 pounds and rediscover blow jobs.
Hello, Mutants!
Where the white people come from, by Rick Weiss in The Washington Post:
Scientists said yesterday that they have discovered a tiny genetic mutation that largely explains the first appearance of white skin in humans tens of thousands of years ago, a finding that helps solve one of biology's most enduring mysteries and illuminates one of humanity's greatest sources of strife.The work suggests that the skin-whitening mutation occurred by chance in a single individual after the first human exodus from Africa, when all people were brown-skinned. That person's offspring apparently thrived as humans moved northward into what is now Europe, helping to give rise to the lightest of the world's races.
Leaders of the study, at Penn State University, warned against interpreting the finding as a discovery of "the race gene." Race is a vaguely defined biological, social and political concept, they noted, and skin color is only part of what race is -- and is not.
In fact, several scientists said, the new work shows just how small a biological difference is reflected by skin color. The newly found mutation involves a change of just one letter of DNA code out of the 3.1 billion letters in the human genome -- the complete instructions for making a human being.
"It's a major finding in a very sensitive area," said Stephen Oppenheimer, an expert in anthropological genetics at Oxford University, who was not involved in the work. "Almost all the differences used to differentiate populations from around the world really are skin deep."
The work raises a raft of new questions -- not least of which is why white skin caught on so thoroughly in northern climes once it arose. Some scientists suggest that lighter skin offered a strong survival advantage for people who migrated out of Africa by boosting their levels of bone-strengthening vitamin D; others have posited that its novelty and showiness simply made it more attractive to those seeking mates.
The work also reveals for the first time that Asians owe their relatively light skin to different mutations. That means that light skin arose independently at least twice in human evolution, in each case affecting populations with the facial and other traits that today are commonly regarded as the hallmarks of Caucasian and Asian races.
Several sociologists and others said they feared that such revelations might wrongly overshadow the prevailing finding of genetics over the past 10 years: that the number of DNA differences between races is tiny compared with the range of genetic diversity found within any single racial group.
Even study leader Keith Cheng said he was at first uncomfortable talking about the new work, fearing that the finding of such a clear genetic difference between people of African and European ancestries might reawaken discredited assertions of other purported inborn differences between races -- the most long-standing and inflammatory of those being intelligence.
"I think human beings are extremely insecure and look to visual cues of sameness to feel better, and people will do bad things to people who look different," Cheng said.
I think people are truly more divided by how much money they have or don't have than anything else. Accordingly, I heard Morgan Freeman talking in a 60 Minutes preview last night that he wants to do away with the terms "black" and "white" as ways of describing people. A lady from the NAACP came on saying something along the lines of "He's got enough money that he's no longer black; he's transcended being black."
Fox "News"
First there's this Romenesko letter, from former Fox News producer Charlie Reina:
As with many conflicts, particularly the manufactured kind, dishonesty, greed and ignorance are the culprits behind Fox News Channel's so-called “War on Christmas.” But their enabler, as Dr. Phil might call it, is that well-intended but wholly misguided scourge of society -- political correctness. Rather than promoting tolerance, inclusion and understanding, as advertised, p/c has had the opposite effect. It has made us not a freer society, but one of timid, tongue-tied slaves to convention who substitute glib code words for the more difficult task of actually treating each other with respect. It’s the kind of shortcut that sooner or later circles back to bite you.But first let’s look at what political correctness is, and is not, in this context. Wishing your customers or co-workers, “Happy holidays,” isn’t p/c; it’s common sense. Try saying, “Merry Christmas, happy Hannukah, a joyous Kwanzaa and a prosperous New Year” every time you leave the office, and before long they won’t let you back in. But taking something that’s recognized everywhere – by people of all religious beliefs -- as a Christmas tree and renaming it a “holiday tree” is political correctness, pure and simple. It adds nothing, reaches out to no one. It’s as offensive as it would be to call a Menorah a “festive candelabra,” or Santa Claus “Jolly old Good-guy Nick.” Granted, as a cause for war, this holiday p/c is no Pearl Harbor. But in its own naïve way, it provides the warmongers with just the ammunition they want.
It’s no surprise, of course, that this phony call to arms, this “Christmas (ergo, Christians) Under Attack” hysteria, emanates from the bowels of Fox News Channel. The network is, after all, ground zero in the culture wars that polarize so much of America these days. Make no mistake about it: Fox is on a mission. Its slogans say, “Fair and Balanced” and “We Report, You Decide.” But in the six years that I worked there, what I heard most from Fox management were mission statements – about turning things around, taking news back from the liberals, and giving “middle America” a voice long denied it by the “east coast media elite.” In other words, using its news report to bring about change -- in the media and, ultimately, in the direction of American culture.
...But what really separates Fox from the competition is its unabashed use of religion as a divisive weapon. Common sense -- and common courtesy -- have long dictated that personal religious beliefs be kept out of news reporting unless the story at hand involves religion. But on Fox, it’s not uncommon for an anchor to raise the issue of a guest’s religion, or lack thereof, a’ propos of nothing. The most glaring example I can recall is a 2002 interview with a guest who had been cited for his charitable acts. At the end of the discussion the anchor said (paraphrasing here), “So I understand you’re an atheist.” The guest acknowledged that this was so. “Well,” said he anchor, “we’re out of time now, but I’d be glad to debate you anytime on the existence of God,” and, with that, ended the segment.
This past July, during FNC’s hurricane coverage, another anchor asked a guest: “Do you think God was looking over the people of the Gulf Coast,” by sparing them from a new storm on the heels of Hurricane Ivan? A loaded question if there ever was one. Not only does it presume that the guest believes in God (which, anyone at Fox will hasten to tell you, 95% of Americans do); it puts anyone who might answer, “No,” for whatever reason (including, simply, a deference to hurricane science) on the spot. Now that guest has to decide: Do I answer honestly and be seen on national television as a heathen, or do I take the easy way out and just say, “Yes”? Not much of a choice, as any fair and balanced newscaster should realize.
Fox anchors will tell you that no one in management dictates that they bring up religion. But my experience at FNC is that, once management makes its views known, the anchors have a clear blueprint of what’s expected of them. In this case, the point man is network vice president John Moody. A scholar and biographer of Pope John Paul II, John is a devout Catholic who seldom holds back on matters of the church, or in framing his views in “good guy, bad guy” terms. For example, during the 2001 Senate hearings on John Ashcroft’s appointment as Attorney General, Moody’s daily memos to the staff repeatedly touted Ashcroft as “deeply religious” and the victim of Democrats’ intolerance. One memo suggested a question of the day: “Can a man of deep Christian faith be appointed to a federal job, or will his views be equated with racism, intolerance and mean-spiritedness?” He added: “(K)eep pounding at the question: should Ashcroft’s detractors try to be as tolerant as they would have him be?”
Fox News' director of media relations Paul Schur, a real class act, responds to Reina as expected:
Charlie's rants [below] about Fox News are both predictable and sad. For his sake, we hope he stops howling at the moon and moves on with his life. We wish him well in his current role making cabinets out of his garage.And then there's this site, fuckchristmas.org, with a hilarious rant about Fox's John Gibson and more:
...Now he’s all worked up about Christmas being stolen. What is this, the fucking Fairytale Network? It’s a national fucking holiday and we’re spending gobs of our hard-earned tax dollars on wreaths and lights for your special Santa day. But these bastards are all “But they call them Holiday trees!” Here’s a clue: no, they fucking don’t. Ok, maybe in a couple places, like on FOXNews.com and at the White House, but if Christmas is under attack, I’m Kris fucking Kringle.And guess who’s stealing Christmas, according to Gibson. Go on — guess. “A cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians — not just Jewish people.” (Emphasis mine. Pure, unadulterated anti-semitism, his.) A cabal? Are you fucking kidding me? Could we try to be a little more fucking original with our Jew-hating?
Speaking of Jew-hating, Pat Buchanan has joined the hype-a-thon of the supposed Attack on Christmas, too. Or, as he put it, “What we’re witnessing here are hate crimes against Christianity.” Sorry? We’re not so hot on paying for an inflatable camel for your goddamn nativity scene and suddenly we’re Slobodan fucking Milosevic? Fuck you. Get some goddamn perspective, you little prick. When they start hunting Christians in the streets, it’ll be time to start yelling “Hate crime.” And no, it won’t count when they start chasing you with the torches. That’ll be called “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”
...Can we back up just a couple steps here? At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a fucking war on religion? And how did we get to the point where you can call an organization set up to defend our civil liberties “Terrorists” on national television and no one fires your ass? Enough. Fuck all of you lying little shitheads who wish the world was out to get you so you could play the poor oppressed victims. Wake up assholes — you’re the cowboys, not the fucking Indians.
“But we want to display our Christmas tree on city property!” You can, go right ahead. “They’re stopping us from praying in school!” They’re not, so fuck off. “We’re not allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas’ anymore!” Are you fucking kidding me? Knock yourself out. Say it at work, scream it in your high school lunch room, hell, tattoo it on your fucking forehead for all we care. Guess who’s gonna be there defending your right to do every one of those things? The fucking ACLU. One of these days you bastards are going to drive those fuckers out of business, and then you’ll see some actual attacks on your religious liberties. I thought conservatives were supposed to be all proud and independent? When did they turn into a bunch of fucking crybabies?
Let’s back up even fucking further, shall we? Can anyone tell me how old Christmas is? Anyone? Two thousand years, give or take, right? Gee, who’s been reading their No Child Left Behind History Textbooks? Try fucking four thousand years. Huh. Twice as fucking long as your little baby king has been around. How could that possibly be, unless. . . waitaminute. . .
Christmas isn’t fucking Christian. Ok, now we’re talking.
That’s right, that Yuletide cheer you’re spreading? What exactly do you think Yule is? It's the fucking Pagan celebration of solstice. And those “Christmas” traditions? They’re not just like Pagan rituals, they fucking are Pagan rituals. Way before your Jesus got all magical with the bread and fishes, the Romans were celebrating the birth of Mithra on . . . guess? Go on – guess. December fucking twenty fifth. What a weird coincidence. Practically the whole thing is ripped off from the fucking Druids and the Romans. Twelve days? Check. Exchanging gifts? Check. Mistletoe? Check. And you’d better fucking believe that those decorated trees that Gibson and Co. are so bent out of shape over are as Pagan as the Rune and Crystal Shack at Pentagramfest 2005. You might as well be building miniature fucking Stonehenges in your den.
And don’t you read your own goddamn Bibles? Jesus was born when? In the middle of winter? Lot of Shepherds out watching their flocks around that time of year in Bethlehem? No, because they’d be freezing their fucking asses off. Tell you what – y’all go figure out which one of the different Bible stories about the birth of Baby Jesus® you want to believe, and then we’ll argue about whether it fucking happened like that or not.
Christians just stole a bunch of traditions from other cultures, slapped them together, stuck a fucking tinfoil star on top and called it the Most Important Holiday of the Year. Modern American Christmas makes Michael Jackson look positively organic.
But you boys at FOX still freak out every year about how everyone's out to get your special trees. This is really the most important thing you have to talk about? Whether Target says Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas? Here’s a brainstorm: there’s a fucking war on. Our soldiers are out there dying while you guys do your 14th live feed of the day from WalMart to show us what good little consumers we are. What Would Jesus Do? He’d jump over that newsdesk and kick your ass for that shit. Are you sure you want to hang your journalism credentials on a story about what some guy calls a tree?
Well we’ve fucking had it. You want to play bullshit games and scream about how God’s fucking judgment is gonna come raining down on us if we don't start watching our vocabulary? Go right the fuck ahead. But let me clue you in on something: fire and brimstone ain’t no deterrent for us. We’re not going to hell, assholes, we’re fucking in hell. We live with you.
And fuck Easter too, you fertility–rite–celebrating, whiny, self-righteous, don’t–know–the– history–of–your–own–religion assholes. Fuck off.
The Kid I Want Sitting Next To Me In A Café
If only more people's children were as well-trained as this dog.
Cur Interrupted
Yes, it was yet another hike down the No Manners Trail, Wednesday afternoon at Starbucks:
"It's a public place," said the snippy student who'd been shouting into her cell phone at Starbucks -- this being her attempt to justify why she had no intention of piping down. Exactly right. If you're home in a sound-proofed room, you can shout as loudly as you'd like. When you're in public, you might occasionally lift your glazed eyes from your regularly scheduled self-absorption and note that there are other people around who are bored shitless by your loud, dull life.
When I later tried to explain that "public" means the space is shared with other people, and it would be a highly civil thing if she showed some concern for somebody but herself, she said, apropos of nothing, "I'm studying to be an M.D." Scary. Both because somebody with her level of aggressive disinterest in anybody but herself might actually become one, and because the extent of her ability to make a logical argument was "You're rude!" and "You're disturbing me!"
Most hilariously, at some point, she went up to the counter to ask whether it was okay to talk on cell phones in Starbucks (loudly, so I would be sure to hear, which was her real motivation, of course). When your public behavior is based on whether Starbucks employees are going to do a monologue on the decline of manners in the cellularly connected age...well, give me your mother's home number, because I'd love to talk to her about all the ways in which she went wrong with you. In fact, I think that's my goal. The next time somebody's being a rude jerk, if I can get their name and track down their parents, I think I'll have a word with them. Heh heh.
Don't Complain
At least he isn't driving while talking on a cell phone.
Everybody's A Disappointment
Heeeere's Murrrrtha! (By Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe in Newsweek):
Jack Murtha still can't figure out why the father and son treated him so differently. Every week or so before the '91 gulf war, President George H.W. Bush would invite Congressman Murtha, along with other Hill leaders, to the White House. "He would listen to all the bitching from everybody, Republicans and Democrats, and then he would do what he thought was right." A decorated Vietnam veteran, ex-Marine Murtha was a critical supporter for the elder Bush on Capitol Hill. "I led the fight for the '91 war," he says. "I led the fight, for Christ's sake."
Yet 13 years later, when Murtha tried to write George W. Bush with some suggestions for fighting the Iraq war, the congressman's letter was ignored by the White House (after waiting for seven months, Murtha received a polite kiss-off from a deputy under secretary of Defense). Murtha, who has always preferred to operate behind the scenes, finally went public, calling for an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. In the furor that followed, a White House spokesman compared the Vietnam War hero to "Michael Moore and the extreme liberal wing of the Democratic Party." When that approach backfired, President Bush called Murtha a "fine man ... who served our country with honor." The White House has made no attempt to reach out to Murtha since then. "None. None. Zero. Not one call," a baffled Murtha told NEWSWEEK. "I don't know who the hell they're talking to. If they talked to people, they wouldn't get these outbursts. If they'd talked to me, it wouldn't have happened."
Dimwit Of The Week
The god-believing skydiver whose parachute didn't open and who subsequently fell face-first into a parking lot:
Although badly hurt, she survived -- and doctors treating her injuries discovered she was pregnant. Four surgeries and two months later, Richardson said she and the fetus are doing fine."Just this last week we went and saw the doctor and we've got arms, we've got legs. We've got a full face. The baby is moving around just fine. The heart rate looks good. So not only did God save me but he spared this baby," she said.
If god's such a great guy, why did he let you break your face?
Louder, Softer, Slower, Faster
Anybody know who originated that idea of how to direct actors? (ie, simply saying that stuff, not much more.) Current leads: Gene Hackman, Jeff Corey, Robert Benton.
Hypocrisy Before Marriage
That's what "abstinence before marriage" education often turns out to be, writes Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, on MSNBC.com:
When I went to child-parent meetings at my son’s high school, parents of girls were frantic that the school reinforce the message that sexual intercourse was a bad choice. Parents of boys always seemed to me to be supportive but not nearly as frantic that this message be taught.However, parents' attitudes seemed to change when these same kids went away to college or went off to get a job. A lot of these very same parents stopped preaching that sex before marriage was wrong. A fair number of them would whisper that sex before marriage might be a good idea, especially if the sex was with someone their son or daughter was thinking about marrying. Many of these parents had lived with someone before marrying and all of them who had done so had sex before marrying.
The message that sex must wait until marriage is not the right message to send to a young person. The people sending the message almost never lived up to it in their own lives and nothing turns a kid off like hypocrisy. Furthermore, most kids themselves just don’t believe it.
And lastly, regardless of what someone's age is, it makes more sense to talk about maturity, love and mutual respect than to send an absolute message that sex is unacceptable outside marriage — a message that gets nullified the day a person graduates from high school.
Science and common sense, not wishful thinking and hypocrisy, should guide what we teach kids about sex.
Some People Lock Up Their Fine Wine
Toilet paper, Newark.
Rethinking Marriage
Does marriage make sense for our times? I don't think so. Here's an excerpt from my Advice Goddess column I just posted:
Romeo and Juliet were overprivileged freaks. Until 200 years ago, according to historian Stephanie Coontz, “the theme song for most weddings could have been ‘What’s Love Got to Do with It?’” Sure, sometimes love did follow, but for thousands of years, writes Coontz in Marriage, a History, people married for sensible reasons, like keeping peace between France and Spain. For commoners, matches were not typically made in heaven, but in three inches of manure: “My daddy’s pigs and your daddy’s cows forever!”Back in the 1550s, when it took two to do a lot more than tango, divorce was about as common as cell phones. In those days, putting food on the table meant chasing it, killing it, skinning it, then turning it on a spit over a fire, and there was a bit more to housework than despotting the water glasses and wiping down the microwave. Since the laboring class usually married in their late 20s, according to Lawrence Stone and other historians, and “growing old together” could mean making it to 40, a marriage might have lasted 10-15 years, at best. These days, with some gerontologists predicting that living to 120 will soon be the norm, if you pledge “til death do us part” at 25, you could be promising to spend 100 years together. (You might serve a similar amount of time if you murder several of your neighbors.)
Love isn’t the answer, it’s the problem. As Coontz observes, once people started marrying for love, they started getting divorced for lack of it. Nobody wants to ask whether it makes sense to tell another person you’ll love them until you drop. Yes, it can happen. Everybody’s got a story of that one couple, still madly in love at 89, and chasing each other around the canasta table. Guess what: They lucked out. You can’t make yourself love somebody, or continue loving somebody after the love is gone; you can only make an effort to act lovingly toward them (and hope they don’t find you too patronizing). Love is a feeling. It might come, it might go, it might stick around for a lifetime. It’s possible to set the stage for it, but impossible to control -- which is why people in the market for durability should stop looking for love and start shopping for steel-belted radials.
I’ve always thought a marriage license should be like a driver’s license, renewable every five years or so. If your spouse engages in weapons-grade nagging or starts saving sex for special occasions -- like leap year -- well, at the end of the term, give them bus fare and a change of clothes, and send them on their way. But, what about the chi-l-l-ldren?! Maybe people who want them should sign up for a “delivery room to dorm room” plan, with an option to renew. It’s counterproductive to preserve some abusive or unhealthy family situation, but maybe more people would buck up and make parenting their priority if they knew they just had to get through 18 years on family track: “We’re very sorry you’re in love with your secretary, but there are children involved, so zip up your pants and take the daddy place at the dinner table.”
The rest is at this link.
A Reality-Based NYC Sno-Globe
At Consumerist.com.
Culture, Not Color
Spencer P. Boyer clarifies the rift in France:
The images of black and brown youth rioting around Paris seem to have convinced many that France has a race problem. We Americans might even be tempted to congratulate ourselves that we're ahead of France and other European countries, which are only now starting to grapple with racism.
But I am a young black male who has lived in both France and United States, and I can tell you that France's problem isn't about race. In a way it's a more insidious problem than that, and I worry that events in France may actually be a sign of what could happen in America.
I had my first interaction with the French police on a December night in 1991. I had recently moved to Paris, and was strolling back to my tiny apartment in an exclusive neighborhood. I probably looked scruffy in my old army jacket and jeans. Suddenly two unmarked police cars pulled up. Four officers climbed out, asked where I was going, and demanded to see my "papers." But when I began speaking French, one of the officers heard my accent. "Oh, you're American? Please excuse us. Have a great evening."
I was stunned. Americans had warned me that the French didn't welcome people of color and constantly harassed Arabs and Africans. But I soon learned that being an African American in France is wonderful. I was generally treated better than I would have been back in the States.
I was treated well elsewhere in Europe, too. Off and on, I spent five years on the Continent, first as a student and then as a lawyer, in France, England, the Netherlands and Switzerland. Seldom did I encounter prejudice. Usually I was made to feel special.
I worried that after the Sept. 11 attacks, and America's response, the goodwill that Europeans showered on me would diminish, as anti-American sentiments in Europe grew. My white American friends in Europe tried to hide their nationality. But I was given a free pass. For the most part, Europeans exempted me from their stereotype of America as the arrogant and ignorant bully on the world stage. In other words, I was treated even better than my fellow whites - because I was black.
All of this seems puzzling, especially in light of all the recent talk about racism in France. Yet at the end of World War I, black American regiments that were disdained in their own country were cheered when they paraded down the Champs-Elysées in Paris. In World War II, too, the French embraced black soldiers from the States.
Throughout the 20th century, legions of black American artists, writers, and jazz musicians escaped racism at home by fleeing to Europe. Paris, in particular, has been a second home for black intellectuals such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin.
I have inherited that legacy. Europeans associate me with the aspects of America they embrace, especially African American art and music, and the historical struggle for freedom and civil rights - exotic, but not threatening. It never seemed to matter that I personally was not artsy or hip. I was "ethnic," but I wasn't an immigrant with a culture and customs that were so different as to be feared. I was Christian, not Muslim. Different, but not too different.
And this, in my experience, is why prejudice in Europe is such a dramatically different beast from prejudice in the United States. In America, prejudice has long been a question of color. In Europe, it's not about color, it's about culture. France doesn't have a race problem. It has a problem embracing the culture and customs of its immigrants and their children.
Tats On Hollywood
And here's Luke on tats. Tats on Luke? Looked for a photo, but I couldn't find one. Then again, maybe he's too busy with his lead role in Jesus Christ Superstar to get much body inking in.
Luke, just wondering...what the fuck are you doing in this photo?!
Early Motherhood Eats Women's Wage-Earning Ability
Slate's Steven E. Landsburg analyzes Amalia Miller's survey:
Women agonize over the trade-offs between family and career. Now, thanks to Amalia Miller, a young economist at the University of Virginia, there is a new and particularly vivid way to think about those trade-offs.On average, Miller has found in a new paper, a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year. Part of that is because she'll earn higher wages—about 3 percent higher—for the rest of her life; the rest is because she'll work longer hours. For college-educated women, the effects are even bigger. For professional women, the effects are bigger yet—for these women, the wage hike is not 3 percent, but 4.7 percent.
So, if you have your first child at 24 instead of 25, you're giving up 10 percent of your lifetime earnings. The wage hit comes in two pieces. There's an immediate drop, followed by a slower rate of growth—right up to the day you retire. So, a 34-year-old woman with a 10-year-old child will (again on average) get smaller percentage raises on a smaller base salary than an otherwise identical woman with a 9-year-old. Each year of delayed childbirth compounds these benefits, at least for women in their 20s. Once you're in your 30s, there's far less reward for continued delay. Surprisingly, it appears that none of these effects are mitigated by the passage of family-leave laws.
Considering that marriages end, maybe women who are fulltime moms -- and not the kind whose fulltime work involve a lot of yoga classes and nail salon visits, but real mothering -- should be paid a salary (by their husbands, not the state) for being mothers, or, at the very least, have their husbands pay into a retirement fund. Work that is not paid is not valued. But, not only that, what happens when the "til death do us part" guy leaves a woman at 40 for a younger model? Women who marry or assume they're in a relationshp for the long haul don't want to consider that happening. But, women in general would be much better off if they have it in mind that they can never rely on anyone but themselves to support themselves. Too many women are financially helpless out of wishful thinking and hope. Dumb.
P.S. Stay-at-home moms are occasionally dads.
My Dog Has More Humanity
Hellooo? Moderate Muslims? Perhaps this would be a good time for you to speak up against the barbarians?
MILAN, Italy (AP) -- Italian police were listening as the man identified as an Egyptian radical shouted with joy while watching a video of the beheading of American Nicholas Berg by his al Qaeda captors."Come nearer, watch closely, this is the politics you have to follow, the politics of the sword," he advised another man as Berg's screams rang out.
"Go to hell, enemy of God, kill him, kill him, cut it well, cut off his head," he said.
Authorities say the statements recorded from phone taps and microphones show that Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, a 34-year-old Egyptian facing trial in Milan next month on terrorism charges, preached a radical form of Islam and the need to carry out holy war against Western elements.
The trial is considered one of Europe's major terrorist prosecutions in recent years. Ahmed is not only accused of terrorist crimes in Italy and of having links to cells across Europe, but he also is considered one of the masterminds of the March 11, 2004, train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people and wounded more than 1,600.
Guido Guella, Ahmed's lawyer, said his client maintains his innocence and claims he "never had any role in any association with terrorist aims." He said the Egyptian also says he is not the person speaking on the tapes.
But prosecutors say the statements, which appear in a report prepared by Italian anti-terrorism police, are proof of Ahmed's extremist beliefs. He has been indicted on terrorism charges for allegedly planning an attack in an undisclosed location.
Rioters Smash Store Windows And Cars
Clearly, a result of dumb French policy by those dumb French, huh?
Looking For The Uncrazy
There was some focus at the Evolution of Psychotherapy conference on not just looking at what’s wrong with people, but what’s right with them. The Gottmans touched on this a bit, and then Martin Seligman gave a three-hour seminar on it on Saturday afternoon. Perhaps, on the surface, this sounds sappy -- like (gak!) the Patch Adams group hug session. (They seriously did a group hug. I made a point of not being there that day.) But, Seligman's approach is actually data-based and very smart.
“We’ve had years and years of explicit training about how to find out what’s wrong,” Seligman said. “We’ve been trained to ask the right questions about disorder. But we’ve not been trained to put people in touch with what’s best inside of them.”
Seligman is the former head of the American Psychological Association, and the author of a great book Lena gave me, called Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind And Your Life. He’s in the Albert Ellis camp of therapy (data-based not mumbo-jumbo based), so his research is more than what he called something like “smiley-ology.” (Love that word.)
He explained how therapists got disorder-focused with a bit on the history of psychotherapy. Before WWII, he said, shrinks had three areas of focus: curing of mental illness, improving the lives of relatively untroubled people, and the third, identifying and nurturing very high talent. Then, in 1946, the Veterans Administration Act passed and therapists found they could get jobs treating disorder. But there are three costs of working in a disease model, he said. The first was a moral cost.
The focus is on people being sick, and “…we came to view people as victims.” “…Somehow we omitted the idea of choice, decision, good versus bad character, and the like.” (The National Institute Of Mental Health is not about mental health about about illness, he noted…also noting that he takes a research-based approach, and is grateful for all their bazillions of dollars of funding.)
While in the courtroom, a blame-focused explanation of behavior says, “Oh, she’s a criminal because she had a bad childhood” (my paraphrasing of his quote about the courtroom). But, he countered, “We don’t explain away the good side of life." The moral victimology which views people as pawns of the environment doesn’t work” – vis a vis choice and “agency.” (By “agency” he means autonomy.) It’s a passive view of human nature.
The second cost of the disorder focus is that therapists forgot about relatively untroubled people, and genius became a dirty word. Worst of all, he said, “Because we were paid off for developing intervientions (around disorders),” helping normal people function better went by the wayside.
But, research shows there’s actually something to satisfaction-based therapy. He broke happiness down into three components: Positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. “When you measure life satisfaction across thousands of people – asking who has most satisfaction in life,” he noted that the pursuit of pleasure is isn’t that effective, but the pursuit of engagement (how absorbed one is in work, love, play – when “flow” comes into it), and the pursuit of meaning have a great effect.
He listed a few exercises. One was the “three blessings” exercise. For a week, every night before you go to sleep, write down three things that went well and why. In studies, this makes people significantly less depressed and significantly happier. And, he says, it’s a good exercise because it’s fun to do. Most people keep doing it after the week is up.
He also said that the key to more engagement is finding out what the greatest strengths and talents a person has then helping them recraft their relationships with people, how they use leisure time, etc, to have more eudamonia (satisfaction, via Aristotle), and more "flow." (Flow is what you have when you're "in the zone," in something you're doing.)
Another way to increase meaning is by using your highest strengths to serve something larger than you are. He noted that people get more continuing (quantifiable) satisfaction out of helping somebody than out of shopping. Or going to a movie. When you go to a movie, you have fun while it’s on, then when it’s over, the pleasure is pretty much gone.
He also suggested you not just look at how your family screwed you up, but look at the good things you got from the nutwads, uh, your family, too. And now, I’m looking at the clock, which says deadline all over it, but if you want to read Seligman in more detail, I recommend his book, Learned Optimism, linked above. Then there's Seligman's site, reflectivehappiness.com, and here's his link to the Time magazine article by Claudia Wallis on "The New Science Of Happiness."
There's a free test at his site to determine your "happiness/depression" score, and after that, it's $10 a month for a subscription to excercises (due to costs, he said). He'd really like to make this stuff as widespread and low cost as possible (or free -- getting the government to pay, which I naturally didn't approve of). You want to be happy? Pay for it your own damn self, ya chiseler!
Up Is Down And Down Is Up
And the moon is now officially made of green cheese, and the earth was created in five days, and then Adam saddled up his dinosaur and went looking for a gin and tonic.
Okay, so the now-resigned prof got a little un-professorial when he "mocked religious conservatives as 'fundies' and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a 'nice slap in their big fat face.'" But, he's on the side of truth and reason -- isn't that a good thing?
Uh-Oh!
God bans Christmas trees:
Jeremiah 10:2-8 - Thus saith the Lord, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.... They are altogether brutish and foolish.
I believe this also applies to the painfully trendy brutish fools spending piles of money buying Christmas trees that stand upside down.
A Table For All The Really Crazy People
At the Milton J. Erickson Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in Anaheim, a once-every-five-years gathering of the luminaries of shrinkdom.
What Is Atheism?
"Imagine There's No Heaven." An atheist manifesto by Sam Harris. It might be from his fantastically written and reasoned book, The End Of Faith, now a bargain in paperback.:
Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe—at this very moment—that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?No.
The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.
It is worth noting that no one ever needs to identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, atheism is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87% of the population) who claim to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence—and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: Most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.
We live in a world where all things, good and bad, are finally destroyed by change. Parents lose their children and children their parents. Husbands and wives are separated in an instant, never to meet again. Friends part company in haste, without knowing that it will be for the last time. This life, when surveyed with a broad glance, presents little more than a vast spectacle of loss. Most people in this world, however, imagine that there is a cure for this. If we live rightly—not necessarily ethically, but within the framework of certain ancient beliefs and stereotyped behaviors—we will get everything we want after we die. When our bodies finally fail us, we just shed our corporeal ballast and travel to a land where we are reunited with everyone we loved while alive. Of course, overly rational people and other rabble will be kept out of this happy place, and those who suspended their disbelief while alive will be free to enjoy themselves for all eternity.
We live in a world of unimaginable surprises—from the fusion energy that lights the sun to the genetic and evolutionary consequences of this light’s dancing for eons upon the Earth—and yet Paradise conforms to our most superficial concerns with all the fidelity of a Caribbean cruise. This is wondrously strange. If one didn’t know better, one would think that man, in his fear of losing all that he loves, had created heaven, along with its gatekeeper God, in his own image.
Consider the destruction that Hurricane Katrina leveled on New Orleans. More than a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and nearly a million were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.
Waiting For Gottman
I pretty much flew down to Anaheim Thursday morning, to the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference -- not because traffic was light, but because it was light for me, because I can take the carpool lane in my little hybrid. I got 62 mpg getting there, plus smugness, which I felt loads of as I waved goodbye to all the schnooks in their gas guzzlers stuck in parked traffic.
Well, I could have taken the back roads, because therapists John and Julie Gottman, who were supposed to go on at 8:30am, were preceded by another speaker, going on and on about how family therapy has changed since 1960. He did say one thing I found amusing -- about how, when he worked with anorectics, he held his therapy sessions over lunch, around a dining room table, and had the parents bring a meal. He noted that bank robbers go to a bank, etc…it seemed to make sense to do anorexia therapy that way.
Well, what made sense to me was putting down my note pad and eating my big, crumbly Wendy doughnut. When I’m not giving love advice, I give fantastic doughnut advice. In fact, I’m an expert in the doughnut arena. The best doughnuts I have eaten in southern California, or, in fact, anywhere, are from Wendy's Donuts on Lincoln and California, in Venice. I highly recommend the yeast-filled crumbly doughnut (the yeast-filled are the fluffy ones, not the hard little hockey puck doughnuts, which I don't like). Wendy's doughnuts are best when they’re freshest – 6am or 7am or so, but they’re great even a bit stale the next day.
A word on pastry storage, which I learned from a grouchy patissier in Paris. Never, never store pastry in a plastic bag. Always just leave it in a paper bag or a cardboard box, and do not refrigerate it. A plastic bag will make it all gummy and chewy. Even slightly stale, it’s better than gummy-chewy. And here’s a hot tip I learned from my friend Emily: If you have a gas stove, and you want your croissant to be warm and fresh-tasting in the morning, put a metal pot with a lid on your stove. Do not turn on the burner. But put the croissant inside before you go to bed and put the lid on. In the morning, voila!…fresh croissant. Never say I didn’t tell you any important secrets.
But, back to the secrets of making relationships work. I refer to John Gottman’s work frequently in my column, and link to his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Here's an excerpt from my column, The Taming Of The Spew, which references work by Gottman and his research partner, Robert Levenson:
Emotional overload can literally be toxic to a man (and, in turn, a marriage) according to psychologists John Gottman and Robert Levenson. They cite studies showing that emotional stress unleashes a "fight or flight" chemical response, same as if he was being chased by a Velociraptor. Yes, even if it's only his wife chasing after him to be her combination therapist, best girlfriend, political analyst, career counselor, financial advisor, and strip-mall psychic. There's even evidence that persistent emotional overload depresses the immune system, and may lead to heart disease. So...maybe some of those men who died of heart attacks...really got nagged to death?
Gottman has a “relationship lab,” and a marriage workshop up in Seattle, and he, like Ellis, is one of the people in the field I find truly effective. Unlike a lot of others writing "self-help" books, his work is based on solid data he and his associates have collected over many years, not just opinion. Gottman can usually predict divorce accurately by listening to a couple talk for 15 minutes -- or even much less. How they talk to each other is what makes the difference: Whether they have what he calls “deep friendship,” reflected in the way they related to each other, or show contempt for each other -- which he found is the big killer of relationships.
Now, I’m no delicate flower in the way I speak to people. In fact, a sound looping business near me that refused to stop using our limited residential parking (despite the 12 mostly perpetually empty spaces in their gated lot) once took a restraining order out on me for calling the snippy blonde manager a name. The first time, I asked the manager nicely, explaining that we have a drug problem in our neighborhood, and need to park reasonably close to our homes and apartments. She said they’d use their lot in the future (pure lip service, apparently, since their parking habits changed not an iota).
The second time I went over there, after one of their guys took the last spot in the neighborhood the day my neighbor was coming with her infant and toddler from Costco, the manager responded with a sneer, “It’s a public street.” Um, no, it’s not. It’s zoned residential, and their building was required to provide the parking spaces in their lot because there wasn’t room for their employees and clients to park in our neighborhood. Then she said, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you get permit parking?” Well, we can’t, because of complicated issues with availability of spaces for non-residents and Coastal Commission issues. At that point, I knew we (residents) were simply screwed, so I expressed my displeasure in the way most likely to disturb a disagreeable little blonde woman about my age. I said, in a low, calm tone, “You know, you’re really a cunt.”
Her jaw dropped. I said, “Oh, did that make your head roll off your shoulders and fall on the floor? I don’t think so.” The owner of the business came over. She told him what I’d called her. He said I should apologize. I explained that they were being very bad neighbors and I wouldn’t apologize, “Because…she kind of is.” Two weeks later, there was a temporary restraining order summoning me to court in my neighbor's mailbox. (Amazing how people supposedly living in fear of you and watching your every move thinks you, an extremely white woman who lives in a white house, reside in a purple house occupied by three women who are the color of dark chocolate.) Besides, this is known as a SLAPP violation -- A Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation -- since I went over there not as a general looney, but as a neighborhood activist complaining about a neighborhood issue. (I call myself "the block bitch" -- I'm the one with the community policing team on speed-dial.)
Anyway, the idiots didn't know I was a newspaper columnist, or they probably wouldn't have brought what was clearly a malicious nuisance suit. Being me, I responded, point-by-point, to their sloppy, hand-scrawled, libelous application for a restraining order against me with a 26-page typed response on legal pleading paper. Since they'd intimated in their document that I was nuts, I tucked in a few words Albert Ellis said about me at a lunch we had a few years back, and later confirmed in writing on his stationery so I could send it out with my column samples:
"I have spoken and corresponded with Amy Alkon and find her to be saner than most of the therapists I know."
(If you know any therapists, you'll discount this a great deal. Nevertheless, I still consider it quite a compliment.)
(By the way, the appropriate cunt-calling defense, for all you law buffs out there, was Cohen v. California, 1971 -- the "Fuck The Draft" case. I discovered this -- and a lot of other interested law stuff -- after constitutional scholar and UCLA law prof Eugene Volokh gave me a copy of his book, The First Amendment: Problems, Cases And Policy Arguments, autographed "To Amy Alkon -- Hope you find this interesting. But stay out of trouble! --Eugene Volokh.") Naturally, the restraining order against me was dismissed. While I am, of course, "hostile and unpredictable," as the manager charged in court, I am not violent. The "cunt," by the way, has left the company.
Well, that’s the long and winding road to noting that, even though I have no problem letting less-than-delicate remarks fly when applicable, I’ve never said a mean word to Gregg. First of all, he doesn’t deserve it. And second, you get the relationship you create. That’s where the Gottman’s come in, with their ideas of deep friendship. Although they're more relaxed about verbal warfare than I am (in couples who don't show contempt, etc.), the way I put it, you just never forget that you love the person you’re with – in the way you talk to them and treat them. Every time you’re cruel or exasperated or unkind, it takes a nick out of what you have with them, chipping and chipping until you're finally just two snarling junkyard dogs in human's clothing. And remember, I'm somebody who’s diagnosed as clinically impatient (ie, I have “ADHD.”) But, because I made a pact with myself never to be a bitch to Gregg, if I’m getting impatient, or can’t listen, I tell him I’m getting impatient instead of getting mean. Not rocket science, is it? But very few people seem very capable of figuring it out.
Here’s some of what the Gottmans have figured out: (Unfortunately, they didn't have much time to voice it in the remainder of that session, but I'll go to more of their sessions in the afternoon and in the next few days.) Julie Gottman spoke first. She explained that she and John Gottman studied 3,000 couples, exploring their behavior. For example, when one partner says, “Look, honey, there’s a beautiful boat,” does the other respond, “Shut up, I’m trying to read”? Nearly 70 percent of conflicts were perpetutal, they found, and caused mainly by criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling (mainly in men), which means shutting down.
A few more remarks from Julie Gottman on their findings: Every couple had its own culture, legacy, purpose, meaning, and mission. Their interventions “blend cognition, behavior, emotion, and looks at existential meaning -- what is their purpose and their purpose for being together.” They looked at not just how unhealthy couples behave, but studied how couples who get along “do it right.” And one interesting note for those who suggest conflicted marriages should stay together, no matter what, Julie Gottman said, “The level of stress hormones in children predicted whether parents were having terrible fights or not.”
Next, John Gottman spoke. He said, “Probably the most important thing that we have learned by doing research is what good relationships are like and how different they are from our fantasy of relationships.” Therapists, he noted, have a fantasy of what the relationship should look like, which comes from their own experience and poetry and literature and film. “I think what we’ve learned,” he continued, “Is really the importance of emotion. The split between cognitive therapy and emotional therapy is really kind of silly.”
He added that he thinks it’s important to look at the masters of relationships in different races and ethnic groups. “We find, for example, when we study Latino families, that they are an enormous resource for understanding sexuality, because they actually talk to each other about sex. They talk, after a baby comes, about how to make their sex life better.” He said they let each other know -- tell each other that they’re beautiful and attractive. He said gay couples do this as well -- unlike all the uptight white heteros out there...who are too busy writing to papers to try to get smut-peddlers like me fired!
John Gottman then showed a 15-minute film about how to “read” babies. He explained that how parents relate to babies when they’re upset has big affect on kids’ emotional development. If a parent characteristically does not respond very much to the baby’s cues then the baby withdraws from the world and feels nothing it does really matters. Kids like this will become adults who won’t explore as much, or feel as secure, or (be as at home?) in the world. (I think this is shorthand for “You may even be raising a felon if you’re tone-deaf with your baby.)
Gottman said, “It’s not hard to read a baby’s emotion; it’s really easy, but you have to know what to look for.” When the baby turns it’s head away, it’s not because she doesn’t like you but because she’s overstimulated. Some parents will be upset by the baby turning its head away and turn her face toward them, and the baby will get upset, because she needs time to be alone – to calm herself and self-soothe.
Babies, he noted, operate on a much slower timescale than adults. Like when you‘re a kid – the world goes much slower. It gets faster as you age. Babies take 10 to 40 seconds to imitate you. Slow way way down to relate to babies, he said. Spend a lot of time in sustained play. You don’t have to devote 90 percent of of your time to playing with the baby -- just be fully engaged when you are.
Don’t change game because you’re no longer interested – the baby will feel empowered if you play it as long as baby wants it.Through sustained, play babies can go through a cycle of getting excited about game, having enough, then getting ready to refocus again.
If you want to get the baby’s attention, imitate the baby. Do exactly what its doing. Pretend to blow bubbles back. Or make noise of spoon hitting table with your voice. It lets your baby know he's the archictect of the game, which is, apparently, a good thing.
Or, here’s what works for me: Don’t have children, and you won’t have to make bubble noises or spoon voices at all! Or pick the kid up at rehab or jail when you do the bubble noises or spoon voices all wrong!
(P.S. I thought there must be a book on this baby communication topic. I found one on Amazon: What Babies Say Before They Can Talk: The Nine Signals Infants Use To Express Their Feelings. Please note that I haven't read the book, but it looks like it covers this area Gottman talked about, and it got some pretty good reviews from people who claim they bought it. [Amy the eternal skeptic says: You never know with those Amazon reviews!])
“Stop ‘Must-urbating’ And Go Back To Happy Masturbating!”
I’m writing this blog item at the Milton Erickson "Evolution of Psychotherapy" conference in Anaheim, a once-every-five-years gathering billed as "A Tribute to the Masters" and "The World's Largest Psychotherapy Conference." Driving to “the happiest place on earth” got hellish at the end, thanks to a carpool lane without an exit in the right place, but I made it in time for the big event, far as I was concerned: Dr. Albert Ellis’ talk on how his Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy works on relationships.
For those unacquainted with Ellis, he’s 91, has written 55 books, and started the form of therapy that I think is the best, most common-sense, efficient kind out there (unless you’re a chandelier-swinging looney, and maybe even then, as he mentioned having some success with a schizophrenic during his talk). Here's a copy of the New Yorker article on him by Adam Green. Unfortunately, there’s been a pretty shocking coup by the board of doofuses (aka board of directors) at his Institute. I have yet to change the link on my site because Gregg and I have been dashing all over the place lately, but Ellis’ new site (sans mutineers) is here.
I’ve taken some notes from Ellis’ talk – mostly on the basics of his therapy system and philosophy. All are direct quotes, except where I couldn't type fast enough or couldn't hear something, in which case it's paraphrased in parentheses. Ellis said:
REBT is a pioneer relationship therapy because when people relate to each other they also upset themselves about each other. Not all of the time, but most of the time, and that’s why we see them for psychotherapy.So REBT goes back to early philosophers and Asian philosophers. I started to use it on myself when I was 15 and relatively weak and affected with disability. (Amy note: Al has diabetes.) I didn’t want to upset myself so I found out from three good philosophers -- ancient and modern -- that you didn’t have to upset yourself about anything.
You have a choice of feeling when something goes wrong!
…Healthily sorry and disappointed because you’re not getting what you want…or else you could feel angry, depressed, anxious, and upset about “A.”
(Amy note: “A” is Al shorthand for “adversity” – in Al’s words, “something happening against your interest or against the interest of the relationship.)
So, therefore, most people, most of the time, believe that adversity causes the consequences in the gut and they’re wrong. A doesn’t cause consequences. You cause them at “B” – the bullshit you believe -- instead of feeling healthily sorry and regretful.
“B” is your philosophy – your cognitive, emotional, and behavioral philosophy. Because you think, feel, and behave all at once.
Whenever “A” occurs (and your mate doesn’t love you or your boss treats you badly) you always have a choice.
Ellis’ philosophy is based on that of three philosophers, Buddha, Epictetus, and the Dalai Lama. Ellis said:
Buddha was a very wise man. And he said that you are naturally disturbed by biology and environment, but you could choose not to be…you didn’t really have to upset yourself about anything. Buddha (saw terrible things) and he created enlightenment. You are a fallible, screwed- up human and you live in a fallible, screwed up society. At first (Buddha) was very upset about all the poor people and all the diseased people, but he saw that you could be enlightened and choose enlightenment.2000 years ago, Epictetus, a slave of the Romans, a Greek slave, showed how he could not be upset when terrible things happened to him. He was a slave, and he had chains on his legs, and the master who owned him started tightening the chain on his leg, and he said, “Master, if you keep tightening those chains you’ll break my leg.” The Master did break his leg and…(he was a cripple for the rest of his life).
Ellis then spoke of one of the cornerstones of REBT, quoting (or paraphrasing) Epictetus:
It’s not the bad things that happen that upset you, it’s view of them.
Ellis continued:
(Epictetus) said calmly, (to the master), “See you broke my leg,” and the master was so impressed he freed him and he became (a philosophical leader in Rome). He did it with his own reasoning.The Dalai Lama was taught as a young child not to upset himself. And he had real adversity. He was a Tibetan and the Chinese controlled Tibet and …(he was persecuted, forced to live in India) but to this day, the Dalai Lama has compassion for (the Chinese), not anger, not depression, not anxiety. (He found a way into) accepting them unconditionally just because they’re human.
Ellis talks about three forms of acceptance:
First, as taught in REBT, you always accept yourself, no matter how stupid and (awful?) and fallible you are.You use the thinking of another philosopher -- Alfred Korzybski: You are not what you do, you do what you do, good things and bad things.
You’re a fallible, screwed up human. That is your nature. That is your biology and your upbringing, both. It is heredity and environment.
(At REBT) we teach “ USA” -- Unconditional Self Acceptance. Never put yourself down.
Here, I think Ellis doesn’t go far enough. He’s great on the basics of simple self-acceptance, but Nathaniel Branden goes more in depth on the sole issue of self-esteem. To read about Ellis’ “USA,” check out A Guide To Rational Living. Read Branden’s point of view in The Six Pillars Of Self-Esteem. (LINK)
Ellis then went on to accepting other people, “UOA,” or “Unconditional Other Acceptance”:
Accept them, not what they do. But, I have compassion for you even though you do that…Finally, you have “ULA” – Unconditional Life Acceptance: You accept reality no matter how bad it is. It’s very bad, it’s atrocious… But it could always be three times as bad. So you accept bad things, but you don’t put down life. You never say ‘it’s awful, it’s terrible…” It is the way it is…too damn bad!”
You make yourself upset by saying two things: “I don’t like adversity, I hate it; I wish it weren't so. I wish it didn’t exist.” But it does.
Ellis talked about accepting the bad things:
To say they’re wrong, they’re rotten, they’re no good, but to accept them the way they are. Tough shit, too damn bad!
At the end of his talk, Ellis took questions and showed examples of his therapy by listening and responding to people with problems.
The first guy was upset because his brother got married before his actual wedding. The guy thought his brother should apologize, that he should have told the truth. Ellis was great. A few of his comments below:
Why does he have to tell the truth when he’s a talented liar?Now why does he have to tell the truth? Because he doesn’t.
Why do you have to trust him? Let him lie like a trooper for the rest of your life. Why can’t you be a happy human even if he’s lying, lying, lying?!
Too damn bad, that’s the way he is! Let him lie, let him lie!
Finally, Ellis lead a sing-along of some of his wacky songs illustrating the philosophy of REBT. Here's one:
“Must-urbating,” by the way, is Ellis’ take on Karen Horney’s “Tyranny Of The Shoulds” -- the idea that there’s no such thing as a “should” -- just your preferred outcome when something happens. He “should have called you?” No, he didn’t call you. There is no should. Either it is or it ain’t -- and what are you gonna do about it?
Light In The Middle Of The Tunnel
Hot Times In The Old Testament Tonight
The Old Testament and the New, thanks to a German Protestant group that's put together a calendar with 12 staged photos depicting erotic scenes from the Bible:
"There's a whole range of biblical scriptures simply bursting with eroticism," said Stefan Wiest, the 32-year-old photographer who took the titillating pictures.Anne Rohmer, 21, poses on a doorstep in garters and stockings as the prostitute Rahab, who is mentioned in both New and Old Testaments. "We wanted to represent the Bible in a different way and to interest young people," she told Reuters.
"Anyway, it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that you are forbidden to show yourself nude."
Bernd Grasser, pastor of the church in Nuremberg where the calendar is being sold, was enthusiastic about the project which is explained online at www.bibelkalender.de.
"It's just wonderful when teenagers commit themselves with their hair and their skin to the bible," he said.
For religious types, these Germans sound like fun.
A link to a couple photos here (thanks, Nash!) Click "weiter" to go to the second photo.
One For The Road
The New York Times' Bob Morris on separate vacations:
Last weekend, when a friend offered me a chance to share her suite in a Miami hotel and be her guest for several exclusive events during the art fair there, I bit and booked a flight.Why not get in on an opportunity for an almost-free semi-tropical bacchanal?
The only problem was that my superb spouse, Ira, wanted to be there too.
"When it's about pleasure travel," he said, "I want us to be together."
Being generous, it didn't take him long to relent and give me his blessing to go.
"I guess this is your equivalent of going on a hunting trip," he said.
Maybe it's more like nouveau riche fly-fishing. But is it also just a form of pure old unadulterated selfishness to grab at some no-cost fun, spouse-free? People traveling for business do it all the time by tacking on extra days for recreation when the work is through. In a society in which personal space is not treated so much as a luxury as a necessity, many partners in happy couples don't think twice about letting one another go off and have an unattached frolic when irresistible opportunities arise.
"Everyone needs an escape," said Janine Hock, a Manhattan wine distributor whose husband, Jeff, goes upstate to camp on his land, chop down trees, build bonfires and frequently injure himself. "My husband gets his by playing Daniel Boone."
But not everyone can detach so easily. For some it isn't about co-dependence as much as it is empathy and consideration. Stefan Campbell, a fashion stylist, often gets glamorous invitations that don't include his partner, and it becomes a dismal dilemma.
"Sometimes to be respectful I just stay home," he said. "Then I feel worse for not going and end up feeling resentful. It's a lose-lose situation and a horrible feeling when you really want to go to something and you can't bring your spouse."
And I think being at least a bit separate -- not living together, for example -- is the best way to keep it fresh. Anybody who wants to live with another person -- doesn't know people very well, or, at the very least, doesn't tell the truth about them. LIving next door, down the block, up the street...now, that's civilized.
Hello, Soldier!
One of a bunch of amazing vintage postcards I bought on e-Bay to give to Gregg; this one, from WWII; some, from WWI and before.
Look Who's Caulking
New Advice Goddess column up -- a letter from a guy who can't get his girlfriend to dress up in clothes not made of denim. He asked her to dress up for a date once. She wore a denim skirt. Here's an excerpt from my answer:
It all started in offices across America with “casual Friday.” Like horror movie ooze, Gap khaki spread across the work week, until casual Friday was preceded by casual Monday through Thursday. There was no place to go but down. Before long, casual Friday started looking more like sloppy Saturday, and your corporate lawyer was greeting you at the elevator in flip-flops and pajama bottoms.Lately, it’s increasingly hard to tell $20 million leading ladies from those earning $20 a day redeeming cans, and ragged, unshaven Hollywood moguls from ragged, unshaven Hollywood Boulevard bums. Since both often appear to be shouting at nobody in particular, it helps to look for the Bluetooth headset -- a sign that the guy probably has a real live person on the other end of his ravings, and parks something tagged “Jaguar” or “Mercedes,” not “Please Return This Cart To Staples.”
The rest of the column is at this link. The link to the barefoot slob sitting across the aisle from me on the plane the other day is here. Note: If you are a man, I do not want to see your hairy toes unless we are taking a shower together. Or, your bare chest unless, as Nancy Rommelman pointed out, you are playing basketball (and I'll add) in 9,000 degree heat. Or, unless you are gay and the model for a men's cologne ad. Other bits of fashion fascism from me to be dispensed upon request.
Federal Emergency Muckup Agency
Katrina is fading away in the minds of most of us, but many of those affected aren't seeing much relief. Here's a lady named Maria Russell who's been blogging about it on MSNBC:
That's a picture of her ruined house, before and after. And here's FEMA's response:
“The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the State of Mississippi have reviewed your request for disaster assistance. Listed below is our decision regarding your request. This initial determination will not preclude you from receiving future assistance.Determination: IID- Ineligible – Insufficient Damage
Total Grant Amount: $0.00."
Ineligible because of insufficient damage? Insufficient damage? Let me get this right: Our house was completely wiped out and we have insufficient damage?
Well, one thing is for sure: This hurricane has provided an infinite amount of log fodder. And this particular subject has both incensed and inspired me.
The attitude of always giving others the benefit of the doubt was instilled in me at a very young age, and so I forced myself to continue reading the information that followed:
“Please refer to “HELP AFTER A DISASTER,” the FEMA Applicant’s Guide, which was mailed to you after you applied for assistance. The section entitled “If You Are/Are Not Eligible for Help” (pages 6-9) explains the reasons which support our decision.”
So I did. I learned that “there was not enough damage to your home or property for you to qualify for this program.”
'Inconceivable'
This is incomprehensible! It is inconceivable that our loss was viewed that way. We needed more information.
Dave telephoned FEMA Friday morning and was told that our inspector, who had been sent to investigate our claim, had made an error and that we would have to initiate the entire process all over again. The rep on the other end of the line seemed indifferent to our situation. Suffice it to say that the level of our frustration has definitely surpassed being more than just a minor inconvenience. It has been more than three months since Katrina; is there really this much ineptness at the government level?
Indefatigable, Dave searched for the phone number of our inspector and called him. He said that, no, he had filled out the paperwork correctly, but that for some reason the intake computer was inadvertently processing everyone’s form incorrectly. Is this incredible, or what? Obviously, this is not an isolated incident. How many people are being, for lack of a better word, screwed?
If we had an exorbitant income or had submitted an incomplete application or had been inconsistent in our record-keeping, we might chalk this experience up to being something that tests our integrity. But what we are asking for is not inappropriate.
We hope that someone can give us some insight as to why we are incapable of collecting disaster assistance. We have no home, and yet we instinctively feel obligated to pay the mortgage each month. We are honest people with the incentive to play by the rules. Is there anyone out there who can justify the incompetence? Obviously I was inclined to have some fun while writing this, but the question remains.
Sleazy Pickins
Kinsley on what Cunningham's corruption says about "conservative" Washington:
It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition, and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then finally you exploit the system—your connections in it, and your understanding of it—for personal profit.And it remains true, sort of, but faster. Even the appalling Jack Abramoff had ideals at one point. But he took a shortcut straight to corruption. On the other hand, you can now trace the traditional moral arc in the life of conservative-dominated Washington itself, which began with Ronald Reagan's inauguration and marks its 25th anniversary in January. Reagan and company arrived to tear down the government and make Washington irrelevant. Now the airport and a giant warehouse of bureaucrats are named after him.
By the 20th anniversary of their arrival, when an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court ruling gave them complete control of the government at last, the conservatives had lost any stomach for tearing down the government. George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was more like an apology than an ideology. Meanwhile Tom DeLay—the real boss in Congress—openly warned K Street that unless all the choice lobbying jobs went to Republicans, lobbyists could not expect to have any influence with the Republican Congress. This warning would be meaningless, of course, unless the opposite was also true: If you hire Republican lobbyists, you and they will have influence over Congress. And darned if DeLay didn't turn out to be exactly right about this!
No prominent Republican upbraided DeLay for his open invitation to bribery. And bribery is what it is: not just campaign contributions, but the promise of personal enrichment for politicians and political aides who play ball for a few years before cashing in.
...Like medieval scholastics counting the angels on the head of a pin, Justice Department lawyers are struggling with the question of when favors to and from a member of Congress or a congressional aide take on the metaphysical quality of a corrupt bribe. The brazenness of the DeLay-Abramoff circle has caused prosecutors to look past traditional distinctions, such as that between campaign contributions and cash or other favors to a politician personally. Or the distinction between doing what a lobbyist wants after he has taken you to Scotland to play golf, and promising to do what he wants before he takes you to Scotland to play golf.
These distinctions don't really touch on what's corrupt here, which is simply the ability of money to give some people more influence than others over the course of a democracy where, civically if not economically, we are all supposed to be equal.
Deadline Day!
But, see below: If only it were this easy to get the words out!
(This ad is a page out of Gregg's research, which I found after my Perrier bottle exploded, and he spread all his work out on our hotel room floor to dry, which made it feel like fall, but with Xeroxes on the ground instead of leaves.)
Is it just me, or does that child look rather satanic?
Preparing For Garbage Pickup During A Heat Wave
Oops, were those Patriot Act funds that went for air-conditioned garbage trucks in Newark supposed to be for terrorism prevention? Thomas Keane and Lee H. Hamilton, the former chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 commission, argue for a little common sense in fund allocation:
Unfortunately, the original Patriot Act did not require these funds to be allocated on the basis of risk. Billions have been distributed with virtually no risk assessment, and little planning. Nor has the federal government set preparedness standards to help state and local governments use the money wisely. The District of Columbia used part of its grant to buy leather jackets and to send sanitation workers to self-improvement seminars. [snip] Columbus, Ohio, bought body armor for fire department dogs. These are not the priorities of a nation under threat.The result of this disarray is that taxpayers have no guarantee that these billions have increased our overall level of national preparedness. The response to Hurricane Katrina suggests that we have not come far.
Goverment by the stupid, for the stupid. I guess we deserve the assholes we vote in. Then again, to be fair, we don't often have much choice. Kerry vs. Bush? I writhed in pain as I chose one sell-out C student over another, voting more against the religious right than for the lost, dimwitted Democrats.
Open Barn At 30,0000 Feet
They’re always with a kid, the vile and manners-free, taunting you with the fact that they've reproduced themselves so others can carry on for generations in their ill-mannered ways. This man, seated next to his young daughter, treated me to a 30-minute free show of his dirty-soled bare feet. Mmm-mmm good!
Luckily, my photo is a bit blurry, so you may find hard to see the little landing strip of dirt imbedded in his sole, just right of center, just down from his, ugh!, bare toes! But, it gets better. At one point, he started fondling his filthy sole!...petting it with his hand, back and forth and up and down...like a lover! He eventually put this masturbated foot flat on the floor, but both of his feet remained uncovered for the rest of the four-hour flight. (There's a reason, even with all the bankruptcies and cash crises in the airline industry these days, that airlines continue to put a barf bag in every seat pocket.)
Clearly, there’s never been a better time in history to be a woman, yet it’s episodes like this that make me long for time-travel – back to the days when people dressed up to fly. Those who do dress are sometimes rewarded. I got Gregg this fabulous English fur-felt fedora last year for his birthday, and I’m pretty sure it had something to do with his getting a free companion upgrade for me so we could both sit in first class together when we went in for Elmore’s birthday. People always treat me differently -- better, that is -- when I'm wearing some big, glam hat. Unfortunately, even that seems unlikely to inspire the violently uncouth to shoe up.
And Justice For Some
It's Republicans-take-all says a New York Times editorial:
The rules of American democracy say every president may install his own team of like-minded people in the government - even at a place like the Justice Department, which is at its root a law-enforcement agency and not a campaign branch office. But the Bush administration seems to be losing sight of the fact that the rules also say the majority party of the moment may not use its powers to strip citizens of their rights, politicize the judicial system or rig the election process to keep itself in office.There are sections of the Justice Department that are supposed to be dedicated to enforcing the laws that protect the rights of all Americans, not just Republican officeholders and the people who give them money. The Civil Rights Division, for example, has enforced anti-discrimination laws, including the sacred Voting Rights Act, since the 1960's, under more Republican presidents than Democratic presidents.
But The Washington Post's Dan Eggen reported last week that the Justice Department has been suppressing for nearly two years a 73-page memo in which six lawyers and two analysts in the voting rights section, including the group's chief lawyer, unanimously concluded that the Texas redistricting plan of 2003 illegally diluted the votes of blacks and Hispanics in order to ensure a Republican majority in the state's Congressional delegation. That plan was shoved through the Texas State Legislature by Representative Tom DeLay, who abused his federal position in doing so and is now facing criminal charges over how money was raised to support the redistricting.
The Post said the lawyers charged with analyzing voting rights violations were overruled by political appointees, and ordered not to discuss the case. The Justice Department then approved the Texas plan, which had been under review because the voting law requires states with a history of discriminatory election practices to get electoral map changes approved in advance.
This outrageous case is only one way in which the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and now Alberto Gonzales has abused its law-enforcement mandate in the service of the Republican majority. Last month, the Post reported that political appointees also overruled voting rights lawyers who rejected a Georgia law requiring that voters without a picture ID buy one for $20 - at offices that were set up in only 59 of the state's 159 counties. The Justice Department falsely claimed that the decision to O.K. the law - which was little more than a modern-day version of a poll tax aimed at reducing turnout among poor minorities - was made with the concurrence of the career lawyers. A federal court later struck down the law, properly.
Give me Whitewater, the White House travel office, Clinton and his girlfriends. Remember how we spent millions of dollars chasing Clinton's lies about the whereabouts of his penis? Those were the days.
Lost?
Man on camel, dead of winter, Birmingham, Michigan.
USA A World Leader!
In religiously-based stupidity. Luckily, the Europeans, who are more prone to economically-based stupidity, are leading the way in urging African nations to get behind condom use as the most effective way to battle AIDs. Sarah Boseley writes in the Guardian:
...the statement from 22 European Union member states, released at a meeting under the U.K. presidency in London Wednesday, calls on developing world governments to use every prevention tool, from condoms to clean needles to sexual health clinics, in a bid to slow down the spread of HIV. UNAIDS' latest figures show 40 million people are now infected, and the rate is rising as fast as ever."We, the European Union, firmly believe that, to be successful, HIV prevention must utilize all approaches known to be effective, not implementing one or a few selective actions in isolation," the statement says.
The international development secretary, Hilary Benn, told the Guardian that the evidence had shown what worked, from tackling stigma to supplying condoms and clean needles. "It is very important that those messages are heard loud and clear by everybody," he said.
Asked whether the U.K. disagreed with the U.S. emphasis on abstinence, he said: "Abstinence works if people can abstain, but I don't think people should die because they have sex. We need to make sure people have all the means [of prevention] at their disposal -- condoms and clean needles. It includes education and access to sexual and reproductive health services. We are very clear about that."
In August the U.N. secretary general's special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, Stephen Lewis, accused the United States of "doing damage to Africa" by cutting funds for condoms in Uganda while promoting abstinence. "There is no doubt the condom crisis in Uganda is being driven by" U.S. policies, said Lewis. "To impose a dogma-driven policy that is fundamentally flawed is doing damage to Africa."
What Banning Gay Marriage Means
From a practical perspective:
In Michigan, Republican Attorney General Mike Cox and several conservative groups are arguing in court that the gay-marriage ban approved by voters in 2004 should be interpreted as barring local governments and public universities from providing health insurance to partners of gay workers.In Nebraska, state officials are trying to reinstate a ban on same-sex marriages that was struck down by a federal judge and is considered by gay-rights advocates to be the harshest such ban in the nation. Approved with 70 percent support in 2000, the constitutional amendment bars virtually any legal protections for same-sex couples, including shared health benefits for gays employed by the state. The amendment "made gay people into political outcasts," said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Tamara Lange.
In Ohio, conservatives who helped win passage of a 2004 ban on same-sex marriages and civil unions are now suing to stop a state university from offering health insurance to employees' same-sex partners.
That Miami University program "violates state law by creating a legal status for same-sex couples designed to mimic marriage," said lawyer Jeff Shafer of the Alliance Defense Fund. "Granting special legal status to newfangled nonmarital relationships is a state policy option rejected by the voters."
Lambda Legal lawyer Camilla Taylor said the lawsuit, if successful, would validate discrimination. "I'm sure gay and lesbian families are wondering if Ohio is the right state for them to live in," she said.
In New Jersey, one of a handful of states with a domestic partnership law, activists were dismayed by two recent cases dramatizing the law's limitations. In one case, Ocean County officials refused to approve the transfer of death benefits to the lesbian partner of a cancer-stricken law enforcement officer, Lt. Laurel Hester. In another case, also involving lesbians who registered as domestic partners, 66-year-old Betty Jordan is suing the state because of a ruling that she is not entitled to the couple's home and cars after her partner's death in July.
This blog post is dedicated to all the people who think religion is harmless.
I Just Met A Girl Named Maria
Fritz Lang's girlfriend, standing naked in the window of the cool prop store, Hill and Main Street, Santa Monica.
Osama Bin Alkon, Checking In
We flew via Northworst to Detroit last night. At LAX, when I got up to the metal detectors, the woman checking IDs and boarding passes was on her cell phone – in speaker phone mode! – so I could hear the other person talking as she looked at my docs. Unbelievable. Which isn’t to say I thought this woman or many of those who pretend to give your documents a serious look before you go through the search process could find a bomb in a bomb factory. But can’t we at least have the pretense that we’re safer – not just more annoyed?
I wanted to ask the woman a question – if I needed to be holding my boarding pass as I went through the metal detector – but I didn’t quite know when to cut into the conversational stream. When I was through the metal detectors, I spoke to a TSA guy about speakerphonetta. He just shrugged and said the on-the-way-in checkers aren’t part of the TSA; the airlines hire them. He he knew her boss and would say something, but there were no guarantees that anything would be done by the company, “Aviation Safeguard.” Aviation Safeguard? What was she safeguarding, her social life?
Iraq: Mission Accomplished!
Well, not exactly accomplished. But George Bush has a strategy! No, make that a plan.
What Goes Around Cums Around
Sorry for the headline; I couldn't resist. Like the religious nutters who go around handing out bibles, a group of atheists played a little (slapping the) monkey-see monkey-do -- non-god bless their little black hearts -- offering to take people's unwanted bibles and give them porn in exchange:
A group of atheists at UTSA was asking students to exchange bibles for porn magazines Wednesday, and that has made some religious leaders angry. News 4 WOAI first broke the story at 6 p.m. Wednesday.At a Wednesday night church service, The Bible is the bond between believers, but on the UTSA campus a group of students were calling scripture, smut.
“We consider The Bible to be a very negative force in the history of the world,” student Ryan Walker said. He is part of a student group calling itself the "Atheist Agenda."
Club members were on campus asking students to exchange religious materials for pornographic magazines like Black Label and Playboy.
News 4 WOAI’s Demond Fernandez showed the Athiest Agenda's "Smut for Smut" fliers to Pastor Rick Hawkins of the Family Praise Center.
“In my opinion, there are no atheists. There are fools,” Hawkins said. “So, that would be foolish propaganda.”
This from a man who believes a big imaginary friend in the sky is moving us all around like chess pieces! And that we're all guilty, at birth, of robbing a liquor store or of whatever Daddy did, along with generations of his low-born relations.
Sets And The City
The view from the bar at Casa Del Mar at sunset.
Bread For Head
One British man out of 11 has paid to get laid says a study in, now don't laugh...the journal, Sexually Transmitted Infections:
The findings are based on two national surveys on sexual habits, conducted among 6000 British men aged 16-44 in 1990 and among 4,700 in 2000.In 1990, 5.6 per cent of the men said they had paid for sex at some point during their lives, with 2 per cent saying they had done this within the previous five years, and 0.5 per cent within the previous year.
A decade later, the comparable figures were nearly double.
In 2000, almost 9 per cent of men said they had paid for sex, while 4.2 per cent said they had done so in the past five years, and 1.3 per cent in the previous year.
Those who in 2000 said they had paid for sex within the previous five years were typically aged between 25 and 34, were single and living in London.
"A significant proportion of men in Britain pay women for sex, and ... this proportion is increasing," say the authors, led by Helen Ward, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London.
I have no problem at all with prostitution. It's a fair exchange of money for services. The service, of course, to drag out the cliché, is leaving afterward. But, seriously, for years, I'd advised an old boyfriend to see "escorts." He'd have sex with these girls he just wasn't interested in having a relationship with. He's in one of those fields where women get dollar signs in their eyes just hearing about it. Every three months or so, he'd have one of them pounding on his door at 3am, "Does nothing we had together mean anything to you?" (Answer: "Not really, no.") Each time, I'd yell at him for being unethical -- not for having sex, of course, but for fooling somebody into it. Finally, finally, I convinced him to pay for it. He called me the day after, somewhat mad: "Why didn't you make me do this sooner?"
Why Your Life Sucks And What You Can Do About It
I'm not a fan of many self-help books, but I got one that looks good in the mail the other day, same title as above, by Alan H. Cohen. It's targeted to people a bit confused about why their lives are so messed up, from love to what they do and beyond. Looks a bit similar to the way I write -- a debunking of the really dumb, irrational crap people believe -- but without the woowoo California tone of a lot of the books in the genre that can be such a powerful emetic.
I Believe In Dog
Go ahead, worship her.
Shut The Little Brats Up!
Get your little savages in line! Good news in The New York Times, in an article by Judith Warner, who reports that people seem to be tiring of all the overindulged brats out there (the fault of the parents, of course):
Last month, an Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans said they believed that people are ruder now than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and that children are among the worst offenders. (As annoyances, they tied with obnoxious cellphone users.)The conservative child psychologist John Rosemond recently denounced in his syndicated column the increasing presence of "disruptive urchins" who "obviously have yet to have been taught the basic rudiments of public behavior," as he related the wretched experience of dining in a four-star restaurant in the company of one child roller skating around his table and another watching a movie on a portable DVD player.
In 2002, only 9 percent of adults were able to say that the children they saw in public were "respectful toward adults," according to surveys done then by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan and nonprofit public opinion research group. In 2004, more than one in three teachers told Public Agenda pollsters they had seriously considered leaving their profession or knew a colleague who had left because of "intolerable" student behavior.
Even Madonna - her "Papa Don't Preach" years long past - has joined the throng, proclaiming herself a proud "disciplinarian" in a recent issue of the British magazine Harpers & Queen and bragging that, as a mom, she takes a tough line on homework, tidiness and chores: "If you leave your clothes on the floor, they're gone when you come home."
I've always loved Madonna. Or any mother with an appropriate amount of the Wicked Witch Of The West in her.
Hayek And Rauch On Gay Marriage
First, we have Hayek, as detailed by Rauch, author of Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, in a piece in Reason magazine:
...There are times, Hayek said (in Law, Legislation, and Liberty), when what he called "grown law" requires correction by legislation. "It may be due simply to the recognition that some past development was based on error or that it produced consequences later recognized as unjust," he wrote. "But the most frequent cause is probably that the development of the law has lain in the hands of members of a particular class whose traditional views made them regard as just what could not meet the more general requirements of justice....Such occasions when it is recognized that some hereto accepted rules are unjust in the light of more general principles of justice may well require the revision not only of single rules but of whole sections of the established system of case law."
Then there's Rauch on Hayek:
That passage, I think, could have been written with gay marriage in mind. The old view that homosexuals were heterosexuals who needed punishment or prayer or treatment has been exposed as an error. What homosexuals need is the love of another homosexual. The ban on same-sex marriage, hallowed though it is, no longer accords with liberal justice or the meaning of marriage as it is practiced today. Something has to give. Standing still is not an option.
Tweezerman Gets His Wings Back
For those of your who are not female or transexual, Tweezerman is pretty much the best tweezers out there, the Cadillac of tweezing. Unfortunately for any woman or tranny with wayward brows, the little darling has been banned on planes since shortly after September 11 (as if that's made us safer -- not just more annoyed). Yes, a Tweezerman is a powerful thing, but let's be sensible people -- it would take about a year to chip into the cockpit, even with the mighty T-Man.
Perhaps owing, in part, to common sense, as of December 20...heeeee's baaaa-aaaack!...thanks to a few changes in the search procedues by the TSA. Eric Lipton writes in The New York Times:
The changes include a new type of random search, a revision of the pat-down process and the end of a ban on small scissors and certain other sharp tools in carry-on luggage.The goal of the changes, which will be announced Friday and go into effect on Dec. 20, is to try to disrupt the now-familiar routine associated with security screening, a routine that federal officials fear would-be terrorists may have studied to figure out ways to circumvent it.
"We don't want the predictability of the system to be used against us," said Yolanda L. Clark, a security agency spokeswoman. "So we are introducing an element of randomness that makes it more difficult to manipulate."
Ms. Clark and other officials from the Department of Homeland Security declined to discuss the changes, saying they would be unveiled in a speech by Kip Hawley, the assistant secretary for homeland security who oversees the security agency. A five-page summary of the new policies was obtained Wednesday by The New York Times.
The summary document says the elimination of the ban on metal scissors with a blade of four inches or less and tools of seven inches or less - including screwdrivers, wrenches and pliers - is intended to give airport screeners more time to do new types of random searches.
...But Jon Adler, executive vice president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, which represents federal air marshals, said that allowing scissors and small tools on planes was a mistake.
"These items in the wrong hands can become dangerous instruments that can ultimately threaten both air marshals' and travelers' safety," Mr. Adler said.
Yes, if a flight attendant tries to sell me a pillow I might go a little mad and overpluck some other passenger's brows. Oh, and P.S. being a somewhat hostile kind of girl, I bought myself a pillow today (at a store) just in case. It's nicer anyway, then snuggling up with everybody's cooties. (What? You think they sanitize those fiberglass-like pillow things? Or those nasty blankets? Haw, haw, haw!)